Graham Platner, Jon Ossoff and the New Rules of Political Attention

27:36He has been doing a lot of press. And I think this is another thing where you have to if you're going to do it, you got to be all in, which is you're going to go in your face questions and you're going to talk to people. And that is, I think, one of the lessons of our new era of the dynamics of scandal, whatever they are, is that attention moves very quickly. And if you embrace that and you're like talk to people, you can move through things in a way that used to be very difficult. And then the last thing I'll say about Plattner, I think this is a really important aspect of his appeal. People have talked about the fact, oh, he went to a private school and his grandfather was this famous architect and his mom has this restaurant.

28:18Dad bought his house. Dad bought his house. This is a guy who was enlisted. An enlisted Marine during the global war on terror in multiple tours fighting in really brutal circumstances. And here's what why I think that's politically salient. He has an ability to, for lack of a better word, code switch. I think code switching is actually like one of the superpowers of a successful Democratic politician because the Democratic Party is so varied and diverse and pluralistic. You have to move between different groups. And it's hard to learn how to do that without some organic experience in different worlds.

29:01Graham Plattner really genuinely has that. It gives him that thing where he's able to talk to different audiences. Barack Obama really had it. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all of these people. You know, Bill Clinton was like, that's interesting. Does Ocasio-Cortez have code switching at that level? I think she does, actually. And I think one of the things that you see also, you saw this with Obama. You saw it with, you know, they used to call Barack Obama in the right wing press Barry because he was Barry in high school at a certain point. The idea being this guy's inauthentic.

29:34He's not really who you think he is. He's pretending to be this thing. The flip side of that is this is a person who's had many different experiences in radically different life worlds that has given this person an organic ability to connect across difference that proves to be the superpower in democratic politics. I'm going to take a beat on Ocasio-Cortez here because it's something I'm really interested to see with her. I think nobody knows if she's going to run for president. I'm not sure she knows if she's going to run for president. She is a tremendous political talent by any measure. But unlike, say, a Bernie Sanders, or as we were just saying, a Graham Plattner, she stays away from disagreement.

30:13You do not see her doing what Bernie does, what Ro Khanna does. She's not on Flagrant. No. She's not out there with Lex Friedman. No. She, I mean, she just did a thing with More Perfect Union, which is like a lefty content producer, you know, talking to Trump voters, but in a very... Controlled environment. Controlled environment, right? She's not on Jubilee, which Ro Khanna and, for that matter, James Tallarico went on. And I think one of the biggest questions for her is actually whether she is comfortable. Yeah, that's interesting. Either switching into places that are not natural alliances for her or being herself in those places.

30:53Gavin Newsom is doing this everywhere right now, right? He will go anywhere he's asked, and he particularly wants to go to places where it's going to be unusual to see him there. She runs a very, very, very, very careful operation. Yes. And often when she is in spaces where she's not comfortable, like the Munich Security Conference, it can get hairy for her. She can sort of fumble. And Congress, I'll start with you. Would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move? You know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a, this is, of course, a very longstanding policy.

31:46I mean, if I were her advisor and I'm not, I think the problem is she's not doing enough. So she's not getting the sea legs. That's interesting. And not getting comfortable with things going wrong and also not getting the sort of swiftness to sort of rescue them when they do. You remember that Gavin knew something a couple months ago where he's doing a book talk and he's like, I'm just like you to a mostly Black audience. I'm like you. I'm no better than you. You know, I'm a 960 SAT guy. it's like my sat sucked i can barely barely read yeah like it looked really bad it was everywhere for a couple days but then you just go do something else just keeps moving forward partly though i think all of these calculations about risk reward control lack of control how much you're going in is is what your own personal position is with respect to attention right because she is so commanding of it.

32:40She has the luxury to take much more sort of conservative stances about what press she does. And I think that's a trade-off. I agree with you that like, there's probably a degree to which more would be better. Taylor Swift doesn't need to do a lot of interviews. Exactly. That's exactly it. That she just doesn't have to go. Yeah. Whereas Ro Khan is everywhere. Chasing around Jubilee. Yeah. Ro Khan is everywhere because he is trying to build. Exactly. Like attentional strength. I want to move to Michigan. Let's start here. Do you want to just give an overview of the Michigan Senate Democratic primary?

33:11I mean, you have a situation in which you have a departing incumbent Democratic senator, Kerry Peters, who's retiring. So you have an open seat. You have a very, I would say from the Republican perspective, high quality recruit for the Republican side, who is Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, who is truly out of like normie Republican kind of central casting. Like if you're trying to win a swing state, he is not, you know, he's not some Peter Thiel weirdo who's going to do an ad with his gun silencer. This is designed to kill people. I'm Blake Masters. I'm running for the U.S. Senate in Arizona.

33:51And then on the Democratic side, you've got Abdul Syed, who is a really fascinating dude who was a public health official in Detroit. He's a he's a Rhodes Scholar. MDPhD. MDPhD. incredibly credentialed dude has run statewide and lost for governor exactly and but it's very very charismatic um a creamly bright too had a crooked media podcast had a crooked media podcast i don't know if you've you know i've spoken to him at length he's an incredibly impressive dude just incredible in terms of like he's a really smart guy who knows a lot of stuff um you have a state senator mallory mcmorrow um who has been kind of like uh i would say like a charismatic up-and-comer in national politics even when she was a relatively obscure state rep starting with this big speech she gave after being accused of being a groomer.

34:35Yes. So I want to be very clear right now. Call me whatever you want. I hope you brought in a few dollars. I hope it made you sleep good last night. I know who I am. I know what faith and service means and what it calls for in this moment. We will not let hate win. But she also has good, like, good video content. Yeah, she's very charismatic. You know, like, a year ago, if I were doing this, I'd be like, Like Mallory McMorrow, like one of the big attentional, like emergent attentional stars. And then you have the person who I think there's reporting to indicate that I think and it's probably true that Haley Stevens, who's a sitting congresswoman, who is, I think, probably the establishment choice.

35:16Yeah, it seems like she was recruited by the establishment in part. And what's happened is she has not taken off and she's not of the three candidates. It's whatever you think about Haley Stevens issue positions for qualifications, whether she'd be a good senator. Like, I think she's the least intentionally gifted of the three. And I think the polling indicates that right now, Abdul El-Sayed is probably in the lead. He's gotten a huge amount of benefit from sort of the Bernie faction of the party. Streamer Hassan Piker, who did it, came and did a rally with him, which was both controversial, but got a ton of attention.

35:53And in a first past a post, again, first past the post, primary split field, what do you have to get? You got to get 30 percent, 35 percent of the vote, 38 percent of the vote. So I want to talk about this primary because first, in one way, Abil Sayed is like the opposite candidate from Graham Plattner. Right. He is intentionally capable, but he is not a outside the institution. Right. Like he's a guy who taught at Columbia. The Rhodes Scholar. Rose scholar. He's like the ultimate brass ring of credentialing in the American meritocracy is worn on his hand. Yes. He has run before and lost. When people talk about candidates who have wanted to be in public office for a very long time, he is one of those candidates.

36:37And if you look at the polling in this race, you look at Polly Market or Calci in this race, you can see that he did not walk in and start dominating it. What happened was that he started centering Israel and Gaza. Hassan Piker coming was part of this. And the role Piker played in this, to me, the way at least I observed it happening, is not that it was Piker's endorsement or something that mattered. It's that Piker himself was so controversial that outside groups like Third Way and then the other two candidates attacked. Yep. And in attacking the centered Israel and Gaza, which turned the like Israel and Gaza is like an attentional superconductor.

37:27It is like no other issue with the exception of Donald Trump himself in American life. And for an engaged Democratic primary electorate, Abdul El-Sayed is more on the right side of that issue. Yes. And so I think you're saying something that's going to be very important about attention. It's like there are certain issues in any moment. Like his background, the way I came to know him as a political figure is Medicare for all. Yeah, right. He emerges in politics, you know, Bernie Sanders guy. And like his whole thing is Medicare for all. And like he still believes in that. And from a healthcare, a public health perspective.

38:03But what has happened here is that there, like a lot of attention on Israel and Gaza. And it has become like the defining issue. And Michigan, obviously, very big Arab population. Right. So. And also the Haley Stevens component of this. Right. Because, I mean, we should we should give the backstory here, which is that, you know, Haley Stevens primary to Andy Levin. Andy Lemon was was this, you know, labor organizer and very kind of two state solution, Israel critical, Jewish lefty synagogue president, synagogue president who was who had like a ton of APAC money dumped on his head. Yeah, because he was insufficiently loyal to the essentially the Netanyahu line.

38:50and Stevens knocked him off as part of that effort. And the other thing I would say is, and I think this is incredibly dangerous for the folks who spend their time worrying about America's relationship to Israel and defense of Israel. You have a situation in which you have kind of stacked these different things atop each other, where it's like money and politics, the establishment, the failed status quo, the pro-Israel lobby are all stacked atop each other and very hard to disentangle. And so being the populist insurgent against the status quo, your criticism as Israel, your criticism of the war on Gaza, your views on that put you across these incredibly salient divides that sort of reach up and down from the actual issue of Gaza.

39:39I wrote a piece on this when all the attacks were centering on Piker. And one of the points of that piece was that it is going to be very, very, very important to break the effort to conflate anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism. And it is going to only become more important as Israel's actual actions make anti-Zionism a more popular and morally compelling position. Among progressively minded people. I mean, look, you can look at polling of young Jews. Yeah, right. Right. How many of them want a one-state solution? It's pretty high now. So I will say also, and it's worth playing this, I thought Abdul Syed himself had a very, very good answer disentangling this.

40:28What do you say to the Jewish community who you're going to want to vote for you about your positions on Israel, on AIPAC funding, etc., and how they shouldn't feel alienated by a candidate like you? Okay, I'll tell you this. Nobody understands what it's like to be discriminated against for how you pray like someone who gets discriminated against for how we pray. And most of the time we don't ask how we pray. Most people are asking, what do you pray for? And I pray for peace and dignity and basic goodness for all of our kids, whether they're Jewish kids who are neighboring a couple of houses down from me or my kids who are Muslim.

41:04And I'll tell you that it's really important for us to be able to differentiate between Judaism, the Jewish people, Jewish culture, Jewish contributions to this country, which are vast, and AIPAC and Israel. Those are two different things. I, when I'm elected, will be the chief opposition to what the Egyptian government does. Now, my family immigrated from Egypt. That doesn't make me anti-Egyptian. That just means that I want my tax dollars to be spent here rather than sent over there to cement the chokehold of a military dictatorship on its own people. And I apply the same exact principles to Israel.

41:35I don't want my tax dollars being spent to backstop apartheid and genocide when they could be used to provide things like glasses or healthcare or schools for our own kids. And I worry that a lot of times people want to use the word antisemitism to spread, to defend a foreign government. And I think it's just really important for us to differentiate between those two, because I don't want to be held accountable to what another government does simply because I share ethnicity with the people who live there. And I know the same for my Jewish sisters and brothers. I remember a sign that was put up in Los Angeles.

42:05I saw a picture of in 2008. It was on a lamppost and it was during the Hillary Iraq primary. And the sign was a campaign sign. And it had one sentence and it said she voted for the war. And it was like, that's all you need to know. Like that vote for the Iraq war. That was the thing. That was the reason Hillary Clinton lost that primary. Ultimately, there's a million reasons. And And she came very close and relitigated. But that was the thing. I know a lot of pretty big older Jews who will say to me, I don't understand why Israel gets so much attention. Right. You know, look at what China's doing to the Uyghurs.

42:46And one of the things I say is that they are making themselves a center of attention, right? They really pushed hard to have America join them in a war. They've expanded the scope of that war. They have allowed just constant, you know, in addition to Netanyahu saying he wants now 70 % of Gaza, they have allowed and enabled and protected and caused a constant stream of atrocities out of the West Bank. Like, you can support what Israel is doing, but I don't think you can deny that it's going to come with a tremendous cost. And if you are not willing to have Israel pay the cost of its actual actions, I don't think you should be supporting its actions.

43:33I mean, let's talk about what happened in the Israel Day Parade here in New York in terms of attention. So you've got this. You've got the Israel Day Parade. It's happened every year. And in in the context of New York, it has been a kind of, you know, cross ideological day of Jewish unity and solidarity. Now, this year, it's controversial for reasons. The mayor is not going to attend for the first time in a long time. Other politicians will be there. What happens in that parade? And Basil Smoltrich, the most one of the most far right ministers who's in the Israeli government, who is, you know, pushed for along with Ben Gavir, the law to execute people by hanging, who has been, you know, a proponent of the settlers and more than that has put out a functional plan for the expulsion of Palestinians.

44:25Yes. What I think it is reasonable to call the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Yes. He shows up at the Israel parade with a bunch of like also hardcore extremist right wingers and his intentional politics, his intentional politics. And they do a bunch of interviews. And he even says to one of the interviewers, I love this parade. It reminds me of Jerusalem Day, which, of course, is like the far right parade that happens every year in Jerusalem, where like a very extremist right wing Israelis march to Jerusalem in an act of like very clear provocation. Yes. Like chanting horrifying things. Yes.

44:56Death to Arabs. But Smotrich says this because he's playing his own attentional politics. But you can't. It's like so then after that, it's like, well, whose fault is it? People are paying attention at the parade. Yeah. You know, and you could say, well, he's an extremist. He doesn't represent. He's in the Israeli government. He's got authority over the West Bank. Yeah. It actually drives me completely insane. And it happens all the time in conversations I'm in, but it drives me insane the effort to say that what the sitting cabinet ministers in Israel are doing is irrelevant or they're controversial or it is what it is.

45:38There is. They're in power. They're in power. There's also there's a southern expression I love is throwing rocks and hiding hands, which I love. And there's just also I feel like this this isn't the Israeli government, but APAC and sort of groups around them and associated super PACs. There's a lot of throwing rocks and hiding hands. You've just played in a succession of the most expensive congressional races in history, like a set of record setting ones where you have spent the money that have made them the most expensive. That's fine. It's America in the post Citizens United era. People get to do that.

46:10What you can't do is be like, why is everyone focused on us? It's like you spent tens of millions of dollars to knock people out. Like you could do one or the other. You know, you play in these races, you play in these races, but then you get to be criticized for it.

46:42I'm Paul Tenorio. I cover soccer for The Athletic. And I'm Amy Lawrence. I cover football for The Athletic. Whatever you call it, the biggest competition in the sport is happening right now. and the Athletics World Cup coverage has everything you need to follow the tournament. There's 48 countries taking part from the tiny island of Curacao to the five-time champions Brazil. Even if you don't know your offside from your onside, if you're eager to know more about the teams, the matches, all the stories on and off the pitch, we've got you sorted. Maybe you're the kind of person who's already up early every weekend, waking the neighbours when your favourite club scores.

47:17We'll make sure you get equipped with more information, more insight than anyone you know. We've got more than 70 obsessive reporters on the ground covering the ins and outs from every game. I almost forgot to mention the best part, Amy. Free access to the Athletics World Cup coverage in our app. Download the Athletic app and see you there.

47:41I want to move to Texas. And I want to move to... Texas is so interesting right now. James Tallarico, because I think he reflects maybe something different than what we've been talking about. He is the one case in which I think you can really see an attentional superstar who rose during this cycle, but did not rise because he was so far left or so far right. He has, I mean, I had him here on the show. It's a great interview. People should go check it out. He has bog standard progressive politics. Now, it is connected to a beautifully articulated Christian moral framework. But he's somebody who has broken through attentionally not by being very far left or very far right, not by choosing a highly controversial issue, but actually by front -loading a religiously rooted decency that in part got him on Joe Rogan's podcast and became the signal that maybe he could do something other Democrats couldn't and win Texas.

48:48So I'm curious what you've made of him. Again, I would start with the thing that we've been saying about a number of these people, including Plattner and I think Abdel Saeed, is that he's charismatic, again, in the ancient Greek sense. And I think, obviously, the sort of pastoral tradition that he's coming out of means that he's both naturally charismatic and also has access to a set of rhetorical tools that have been developed literally over thousands of years to grab and hold people's attention. Right. So I think that's a huge part of what's going on. And again, I think that connects to this back to the future theme that we keep coming back to, which is like you can't just raise money and run ads.

49:30Right. If you want to be successful, you've got to have something going on about how you grab people. And he clearly has that. I think you're totally right that he's a unicorn and that it's not connected to that kind of populist message in the same way. He is, I think, a populist, and I think he's very much framing himself as a sort of insurgent outside the status quo. But he's not – he's really not relying on any kind of us versus them framework. I mean he does – It is a little bit of like the billionaires. But it's rhetorical flourishing. It's not the core in the way – Plattner is like – that is Plattner.

50:07thing. It's what comes out of his chest. But this guy is a former president of his college Democrats. Yeah, exactly. Like, he is a different type. He is a person who has wanted to run for president. He's a Teach for America kid. Yeah. Right. He's not a person who has been failed by American institutions. He is not a person who you feel harbors a great anger at the Democratic establishment. You know, he's a state representative. And I think that's an interesting dimension of him. But he also has a quality that Plattner does in a different way, which is that, well, I don't, I'm not saying he was cast in the sense that somebody came out and found him the way they came out and found Plattner.

50:46He does look like what he is in the same way that Plattner looks like what he is. I mean, a lot of people are oyster farmers or lobstermen, but they don't, like you wouldn't see them on the street and think, well, you definitely spend all your time on the water. And like, you know, Plattner looks like a seaman. And Tallarico, like you would cast him as a pastor to play the idealistic young pastor like rooting a corruption yes in a complicated church yes exactly um he just has the whole you could put him in a scene and there will be blood and he right exactly and he rises you know by running his social media strategy which you know eventually gets him on rogan and i think that he also reflects this yearning people that i think is really powerful and how it's underplayed, which is not just for populism or radicalism or even inspiration, but in the Trump era for decency.

51:43Totally. And there's a yearning for public virtue, which I think is a sort of funny inversion of some of the politics of our youth. I'm starting to talk a lot about virtue on the show. Yeah. And I'm thinking a lot about virtue. I think that's partly the experience of Trump. It's partly that I'm a middle-aged dad with three kids, and I think a lot about moral instruction. And particularly a moral instruction in a world in which like the most powerful and famous figure in the country is a moral degenerate. The other thing I would say is there's these different – there's different kind of vibratory levels that different coalitions play on.

52:22And I do think that like the appeal for connection, brother and sisterhood, solidarity, unity, that was the thing that Barack Obama was able to marshal. And that's still deep in the progressive soul. I think it's deep in the American soul. It's the not what Donald Trump Donald Trump is totally incapable of playing in that register. I think the Republican Party increasingly in his era is incapable of playing that register. And the last thing I'll say, and I think this this applies to John Ossoff as well. Where we're going next. Oh, good. In when you think about like, what's the opposite of Trump?

53:04One typology of the opposite of Trump is a nice young man. like what's the opposite Trump's like a nice young man well let me hold and James Tallarico's a nice young man let me hold before we go to John Ossoff and the different Obama registers the nice young man the what it means to be nice the weakness of being nice has been the main form of attack the Paxton campaign has decided to unleash I think it's so crazy like low T Tallarico tofu Tallarico Talafrico which now the Tallarico campaign has Talafrico shirts I think that one was a Paxton mistake but but the The weakness they think they have sensed is that people want strength.

53:43Yeah. And a nice young man who wants you to like him and speaks often of his own humility and has a vegan girlfriend is not strong enough for Texas. I mean, that's a charitable version. They're calling him the F-slur is what they're doing. Yes. You're giving a charitable version of what the actual gay name is. Well, and actually quite literally, like, you know, you have Stephen Miller saying the first transgender candidate. Yes. Right. You know, he's a queer. Yes. It's very schoolyard. All of it. Yes. When we take a step back. It's true, just like cruelty versus kindness. Yes. They're really they're really playing into the campaign Tallarico wanted to set up.

54:21I once heard somebody around the Momdani Cuomo campaign be like, they both got the exact antagonist they wanted. Yeah, that's a great point. Right. And it just turned out Momdani was right about which antagonist he wanted. and Cuomo wasn't. In terms of that race and who's making the right tactical calls, we should just take a step back and say, you know, Texas is Texas for a reason. And if you run a moderately competent campaign with a moderately competent candidate, you will win by five points. Like as a Republican. As a Republican. It's just structurally there. So you really got to screw things up.

54:53If not more than five points. Yes. I mean, 10, 10 to five, right? You run a bad campaign, it's five. You run a miserable campaign like Ted Cruz did in 2018 in a really, really good year for Democrats, you win by two. What I would say is about Paxton is that he's kind of the worst of all worlds in this way, which is that Ken Paxton is someone with a lot of baggage. He was impeached by a supermajority Republican state legislature for corruption. He was indicted for securities crimes, although not convicted. He was also not convicted on his impeachment. His wife recently divorced him for what she called were biblical reasons.

55:27There were a number of his ex-staffers who came out with a statement where they talked about just how awful he was as a boss and in his public positions. I've covered Ken Paxton a ton in my journalism career. You don't hear him talk that much. This is not a super charismatic guy. He's got all the baggage and none of the charisma. It's a weird combination of things. But it's not like there's some amazing magnetism on the other side of it. So if you were setting up the worst kind of candidate in this era, who's got the kind of all the negatives of sort of high risk attentional strategies and none of the positives, it kind of is Ken Paxton.

56:07Yes. But this is where I think there's like just something genuinely interesting about Tallarico, because he to me shows there's actually a lot of pathways in to breaking out attentionally. It's generally interesting that Tallarico was able to beat Jasmine Crockett, who is also like big MSNBC figure, Jasmine Crockett. Yes, big on viral video and is not super guarded and talky pointy, you know, that and I think that's a good attribute. And it, you know, he beat her in that primer. But it goes to show, I think, that there's probably a lot of different angles. Yes. That you can play here. I think one thing that these platforms sniff out, and I don't know why, but podcasting, video, etc., I think they sniff out inauthenticity.

56:54That in a way that was not true when you were giving quotes in newspapers or going on Meet the Press or being on the nightly news, I think actually inauthentic figures could do perfectly well there. Somehow institutions, to go back to what we were talking about, institutions don't care about authenticity. They actually want you to change who you are to conform to what they need. But these sort of anti-institutional spaces. They do. Yeah. There's something about them where people, I always feel this when people are on the show, the first thing the audience can sense is inauthenticity. The first thing they can sense is you not telling them what you really think.

57:29Yeah. And you got to be I think that's such a good point that you have to be you have to be some version of your actual self to figure it out and to do and to do it right. Rahm Emanuel is not, in my view, likely to be the Democrats 2028 nominee. But his somewhat unlikely presidential campaign is going to do better than I think people realize it's going to do in being a sort of force in the primary. Yeah, because he is fundamentally himself. Totally. Yes. In all places. Yes. And so that allows him to just sort of attack and run plays and be compelling. And also he's got to go back to the risk calculation.

58:08He's got nothing to lose. He can say yes to everything. And he's a high risk personality. Yeah, he's got a high risk personality. He's an unusual, highly institutional figure. Yeah. Who's very high risk. Has very, very, very high risk appetites. Speaking of 2028, we talked about AOC a little bit ago, and I think she's one of the big figures here. But what have you made of John Ossoff's emergence as like a cross ideological 2028 dark horse, a person who I've been talking about for a while, but Hassan Piker is talking about, you know, Matt Iglesias is talking, right? Like, you know, Michelle Goldberg just did a great piece on him.

58:44There's something interesting in what people are projecting onto John Ossoff. I have been jokingly calling him in our team slack, the Lisan Al-Gaib, which is just a Dune reference to the like the, you know, the Chalamet figure who is essentially the kind of chosen one, right? The foretold prophet. This is a joke, just to be clear. And the reason that I use that is Jewish Kennedy, man. There is something about the way that he is performing his candidacy, the social media videos they're putting out, the fact that he is very conventionally handsome and young and could be in a movie. Like AOC, he's very controlled in his media.

59:30Yeah, he's not playing a volume game. Not playing a volume game. You don't see him on podcast interviews right now. No. Not playing a volume game. I think that he has figured out a way in a broadly palatable ideological fashion to leverage a populist moral critique of the rot of Trump that can appeal across the different democratic factions, which is important. But also he's running for reelection in a swing state and is right now polling very well. We'll see what happens. But if you back up a couple of years. If I said to you in 2024, which of the, or 2022 or whatever, which of George's Democratic senators is everybody going to be talking about in 2026 as a 2028 savior?

1:00:26I think the answer would have been Raphael Warnock. 100%. And instead, Ossoff is the one people are talking about. And I was looking at Raphael Warnock's YouTube page because he's doing content. But it doesn't have any of the visual grammar. One thing that, you know, you see in a Mamdani, you see in a John Ossoff, you see in a James Tallarico is we this is not just a like an age of algorithms. It's visual, very visual. And, you know, you'll see Warnock and he's like talking and, you know, the Senate press conference setups and he's just like in front of American flags. And Ossoff, they figured out, you know the clip like immediately when you see it.

1:01:06And Ossoff used to be a documentarian who did documentaries on international corruption. So there's a background here. This guy actually knows how to create TV about corruption. But there's something really interesting to me about, you know, first the scarcity, the creating want. This who is John Ossoff, this building anticipation. plus this figuring out of a visual grammar. That's distinct and wholly your own. And looks like Obama. Yes, it does look like Obama. It looks like... It's also the hero shot. It's always a hero shot, which was a constant... You remember there was an onion... You gotta be skinny for that to work.

1:01:45I just want it for anyone else who's taking notes out there in production. You gotta be pretty thin for that hero shot. There was a great... The hero shot being this sort of three quarters upwards angle. Upward, yeah. And otherwise you get a lot of chin. Yeah, you get a lot of chin. And there was this great onion article on Obama or something like Obama accidentally stares too far into future. Because he was very good at this. I mean, Ossoff shot is always. It's always like this. Like he doesn't seem like he's looking at a crowd. Yeah, he's leaning out past the crowd. No, you're right. And I do think it's true that kind of visual branding is so interesting.

1:02:20There's one other dimension of Ossoff that I think is really worth mentioning in terms of 2028, um and which is that he's jewish yes and and a genuine israel critic to see this is so i think to go back to what we were saying about that michigan race there's no way of getting around the fractures in the party on gaza israel perceptions of anti-semitism perceptions of undue influence by the israel lobby like the coalition contains both elements. And someone's going to have to figure out how to thread that needle. And if I were if you were asking me what that person might look like, I would say the first Jewish nominee in history who is also a critic of Israel would be one recipe to thread a very difficult needle for the coalition.

1:03:21Yeah, and the point here is that Asif has substance on this. So he early on signed onto a Bernie Sanders letter that I think only had 19. Yes, very, like with a small group. It was a small group. That was against sending more arms to Israel, given the level of humanitarian devastation that was currently being inflicted by Israel upon Gaza. My colleague, Michelle Goldberg, had a great profile of him. And, you know, she mentions like a Haaretz piece, which is like the liberal Israeli newspaper saying, well, this position is going to make it much harder for Ossoff to win in Georgia. And no, it put Ossoff in position to actually navigate this in a way the others are going to have a lot of trouble with.

1:04:04Josh Shapiro is going to have a lot of trouble here, is already having a lot of trouble here. And, you know, but if you go too far to the other side, you're going to have, right? You're going to need somebody who can represent both sides of the divide at once. And Asif, who is one, centering on a corruption story, who is two, centering on a, he moves a corruption critique into an argument for liberal pluralism. Yes. Right. It's sort of a populist critique with a liberal pluralist answer. Right. Talks a lot about values, talks a lot about being rooted in the civil rights movement and then is able to navigate this dimension of the party's schism.

1:04:45He's also done something on corruption that I have struggled to do, and I don't know if you've felt the same way. The corruption is so overwhelming, and you can hear my voice right now, like, so—it leaves me speechless. It's so brazen. It's so insane. Every single day I discover some new story that is, like, would have been the end of any other politician I've covered. Asaf has figured out how to tell that story very, very well. But one reason is that he often, he moves it to be as about Donald Trump and also about the Democratic Party, also about the existing institutions, right? See, I get why people voted for him.

1:05:28Because even before he came on the scene, America had the most corrupt political system in the Western world. It's been running on corporate money, secret money, billionaire money. Both sides. And it's worse than ever now. Citizens United was the worst court decision in modern American history.

1:06:02And when members of Congress aren't begging for money from lobbyists, they're trying to dodge getting carpet bombed by these super PACs. And see, this is why nothing works for ordinary people. It's not because of woke college kids or trans students or because there are interracial couples in serial commercials. It's because the people's elected representatives don't represent the people. They represent the donors. There's a credibility. He's very careful always to do this, which, again, is another Obama move. Obama would always include an argument from the other side in the argument he was making.

1:06:44Always. Always. People say. Yeah, right. And he does that, right? You know, both sides. And he's very, very careful to make this a critique of the system itself, of which Donald Trump is taking advantage of it, but is not its originating cause. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's also part of, again, it does help to, it helps to be getting your reps before the Georgia electorate. Yeah. You know, it's like comedians. Politicians are like comedians. You work the room. You see where your laugh lines are. You work different rooms. You work larger and larger rooms. And the room matters a lot. And what you, the feedback you get from the room, it matters a lot.

1:07:27It helps to be in a context where the room that you're working is a Georgia electorate. I think this was true of Bernie Sanders in Vermont, where, you know, he only got to where he was after many failures, many electoral failures, many years in the electoral wilderness by figuring out how to talk to the median Vermont voter who was not a committed ideological social. It's why Barack Obama was as good as he was, because he was a black politician who had to work white rooms. Yeah. You know, and he's talked about that, how much you do to win statewide in Illinois, to win in these rural areas where people were very skeptical of a person named Barack Hussein Obama in 2004.

1:08:08The other thing that I think is worth touching here, one thing I see among the Democrats right now is they're all competing to prove they're the fighter. And relatively few are working in the more inspirational side of the tradition. that you look at Newsom, you look at AOC, you look at Pritzker, right? Like, they're all like, I am your brawler, right? I will rip their throats out for you. And Ossoff, even though he's sort of attacking corruption, he is not in that mode at all. It's a different register. There's a type of Democrat who, even if they've learned to suppress it, their fundamental feeling at all levels is a disbelief.

1:08:54I can't believe this is happening. I literally can't believe this is happening. That anybody could like this guy, that these things aren't sinking him. Yes. And he is formed in races. Exactly. Where that is not a register that works. And you cannot, a lot of Democrats have to kind of abstractly come to the view that there are people in this world who like Donald Trump, but they don't know any of them. Yes. And if they do, they maybe cut them out of their lives. Right. And that is not John Osso's world. That's what I mean. So he's formed fully. He's formed fully in an environment in which the appeal of Trump and Trump's power over the electorate and Trump's power over specific people that are that he has to win over or whose family members he has to win over is present from the beginning.

1:09:40And I think there's something really useful and powerful about that for just, again, how you train. But if you look at polling, and if you pretty now look at the prediction markets, polling, Kamala Harris has a lead. I think people are skeptical that lead will lead to primary dominance, but I guess we'll see if she runs. But if you look at prediction markets, the lead is Gavin Newsom. And we all knew Gavin Newsom wanted to run for president, I would say, six years ago. I was pretty dismissive of how that was likely to go. you know handsome white guy with a bunch of scandals from california was like not the not what the democratic party seemed to be looking for who he is in some ways has changed or actually in some ways maybe come closer to a core of him what do you think about the way newsom has maneuvered himself into one attentionally capable in a way he wasn't always but two into, I think it is the fairly wide consensus right now that he is a Democratic front runner for 2028.

1:10:43I think I have complicated feelings. I mean, I think that there's some part of me that just thinks. Governor of California is tough, a tough thing to do to win national. To be the president, of course, New York real estate developer is also pretty tough, too. So what do I know? Yes, I think that I think the the choice he's made intentionally is the one of the most interesting, which is he was always a charismatic guy, but he was not. He has chosen omnipresence. He's chosen to say yes to everything. He's chosen to go everywhere. He's chosen to host his own podcast. He's chosen to host his own podcast.

1:11:22He just had Ashley Sinclair on it. Yeah. Ben Shapiro on not long ago. He's doing things you would not expect. Exactly. And I think it has produced a comfort. That is really, really useful in the world that we live in. I think there's a question of both what the Democratic primary electorate wants and what the general electorate wants in relation to Donald Trump. And here's what I mean by this. You were talking about like being a fighter. And I think there's a little bit of Freddie Hampton said, you don't fight fire with fire, you fight fire with water. And there's a little bit of a question between do you want to fight fire with fire or do you want to fight fire with water?

1:12:05And the our fighter version, like our brawler, our Trump, essentially, which I think is appealing to some people in the Democratic electorate, is sort of the mode that some Democratic politicians have gone. and in some almost sort of parodic ways that Newsom has gone by doing the whole like Trump shtick online. Okay, but let me complicate this in one way because it's why I find Newsom really interesting. Because he is doing more than that. I agree, yes. There are two things. So one is the number of reps he's getting, places he's going. I mean, you and I just saw him at the CAP Ideas Conference.

1:12:39He's just gotten better. Yeah. He's gotten better faster than the other staff. But the other thing, I think a really big problem Democrats have faced since Obama is about describing a kind of unity that we can find as a country, a way of living here together despite our disagreements, despite our history, despite our differences. And Bill Clinton did a lot in this register, right? He, you know, Rhodes Scholar, but poor Arkansas boy, you know, New South. of Obama, I mean, the master of this register. But because he was a master of this register, he somewhat destroyed the ability of anybody else to use it.

1:13:20Because if he couldn't achieve it, if what the Obama era cashed out into was Donald Trump and the division and dissolution of the shared moral and democratic framework we had, then to speak like Obama did in 04, to speak like he did in 08 becomes naive. Nobody's going to believe you, right? But the weird thing Newsom is doing is containing these two opposite ideas in himself, which is one, like, I'll be your brawler. But two, we will just disagree honestly and in public and continue the relationship with each other under those terms. You know, he'll talk to Charlie Kirk, you know, before Charlie Kirk was killed, he'll talk to Michael Savage, he'll talk to Ben Shapiro, he'll go to the left.

1:14:14And Newsom is sort of, it almost seems to be making this argument that is not that we can live here together in some way where our differences dissolve. It's that our fights with each other can be productive. Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I hadn't thought of it in those terms before. It's a very Ezra Kleinist approach. I do wonder whether there's also a kind of incoherence in that narratively that makes it a little difficult to pull off. I don't think he's been able to synthesize them yet. Yeah, that's right. I'm not sure you can, but it's why I find his campaign very interesting. He'll often talk about the place right now in his rhetoric that falls the most flat for me is he'll start talking about they need to be a repairer of the breach, right?

1:14:59A repairer of the breach. It's a biblical line. And you don't feel it. Like, you don't feel how he's going to repair the breach. I want to end here on the big attentional campaign that kind of ended in failure, which was Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles. Because if you were online, it was like this former reality star is coming out of nowhere. He's got the greatest ads. You can't be on X for five minutes without seeing something from him. You know, he's going to, you know, maybe win 50 % in the runoff. Maybe, you know, maybe at least make the runoff. But then it didn't pan out to anything. He underperformed Donald Trump.

1:15:36I think and I think it's a great counterpoint to many of the theories I've been exposing. So I'm glad we're talking about it because, I mean, it was a very successful campaign intentionally. I do think there's something going on. We should just say there's something going on with X right now under Elon Musk that is a little distinct to that platform, which is that it's become a kind of hermetically sealed hothouse of insanity that when you enter it, when you're not in it all the time, you enter it, you're like, you guys are nuts. Yeah. And that's exactly the way many people felt about like what we might call kind of peak woke Twitter.

1:16:13So part of it, I think, is a product of how much that was an ex candidacy. Yeah. There's also a question of what's real there. Yeah. Right. What's being clip farm. Totally. What has a lot of bots pushing it. But the other lesson, I think here, it is never going to be the case that attention is the entire story. There has to be something else happening. And I think with Pratt, there was nothing else happening, really. There was no reason for that man to be mayor, first of all. Why that guy? I do think the Pratt campaign to me really is an object lesson in what X is at this point that I think would be very useful for everyone to internalize because you and I both remember back in the day when people would say Twitter is not real life.

1:16:54and weirdly i think that's even more the case now under the algorithmic empire of one elon musk i think one of the greatest advantages democrats have going into 2028 is not being is that elon musk has control of twitter i think people think of this as a problem for democrats it's the opposite because Musk is warping Twitter towards a hard right, conspiratorial, hermetic nature. And in the way that when Democrats had dominance over Twitter, when liberals and progressives and leftists had dominance over Twitter, they convinced themselves of a bunch of ideas that were politically lethal, but they didn't understand that because where they were, it's like to have normie opinions was politically lethal.

1:17:43That's how it is for the right. I think that's exactly what's happening. And J.D. Vance is there and all of their staffers are there. Whereas like the liberals and Democrats and leftists are split and broken across different platforms. And that is genuinely an advantage. I have come to this exact same conclusion. Yeah. Like Twitter, it's like it's a kind of a curse. Right. It makes you feel very powerful and you pay for it. Let's end there. Always our final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience? So I'm going to spare you all my reading on Italian history, which I think is probably not particularly relevant.

1:18:16I read and loved Ben Lerner's newest transcription. I will say as someone who went to Brown and he was in my class there and I just went to my 25th reunion with Kate, who I met there. It had a particular potency for me that it may not have to the general audience. I recently read, and I can't believe I had never read this book, but I read The Godfather, the original novel by Mario Puzo. It's a combination of some really weird and truly awfully misogynistic stuff, but it is incredible how good that book is in some ways. And also, it kind of makes you understand why the movie is a masterpiece. Like, I didn't quite realize how faithful the movie was to the original source material.

1:18:58And the last one is a new novel that I just am about halfway through through someone else that I know, Courtney Maugham, called Alan Ops Out, which is a great kind of really insightful, searing, comedic look at a Greenwich advertising executive who goes to live in the playhouse in his backyard. Chris Hayes, thank you very much. Thank you.

1:19:30This episode of The Oslo Client Show is produced by Roland Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione, Annie Galvin, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kelbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King, and Jan Koble. Original music by Amun Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Pending Audio is Annie Rose-Strausser.