28. Why Kamala Harris Still Has a Problem

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0:36hello and welcome to this edition of the rest is politics u.s with me katty k and with me, Anthony Scaramucci. You recovered from the week, Anthony, from your, are you still on that massive sugar high that you were on when you were down in Philadelphia? No, I recovered from the week. No, I had a breakfast this morning of roasted cat. I'm now looking on the menu for lunch for a grilled dog. Donald Trump looked like he'd eaten a cat at the end of that debate. I mean, this stuff is just, you can't even make, I mean, listen, it's so crazy. And how many times in your life you said, you can't make it up.

1:07But when you have somebody that should be in an insane asylum running for president. But anyway, the cat tasted really good. I think the dogs are smarter than the cats though. They heard Trump say that they're getting eaten and they were moving last night. They were moving away from the television and they were running from Trump. Yeah. All the gazillion cat and dog memes that we are now going to have to sit through. Anyway, my cats and dogs are very safe. I can tell you no one is eating them. The poor birds in my backyard are less safe, but there you go. So look, before we get going, we are very excited to announce that beginning on Monday, we have something a little different for you.

1:42We've recorded a four-part series which takes you behind the scenes of the 2016 presidential election when Donald Trump won the White House. You know, Cady, it's just an amazing story, right? He's a reality television star. He's a property developer in New York. And then 18 short months later, he slayed, I don't know if you remember Charles Krauthammer, but Charles Krauthammer is now deceased. He was a great conservative speaker. He said the 2016 slate of Republican candidates was the best that he's seen in history. And here comes Donald Trump. He smows down every single one of them. He defeats a Democratic establishment to win the presidency.

2:24And we're going to TikTok this every step of the way. What happened? All the trials and tribulations. And, Katty, as you know, it creates post-traumatic stress in me, but we've already recorded it, so I'm starting to feel better. Yeah, I was there with you. I mean, I covered that whole campaign, and I got a little post-traumatic stress revisiting it all as well. We will release an episode every Monday for the next four weeks. However, if you want all four of these episodes on Monday the 16th, if you just cannot wait, you can sign up to our brand-new membership club. Just go to therestispoliticsus.com to become a founding member of TripUS.

3:02It just takes you a couple of minutes. You know, when you read these selling blurbs, I'm like thinking, man, she would have been such a good institutional salesperson on Wall Street. Can I just come and work for you, Anthony? What was I doing going into, you know, I started out at the Bank of England. I could have stayed in finance. And what did I do? I went into journalism. You would have been running Goldman Sachs, but now you're stuck with me on The Rest is Politics US. And you guys are stuck with us too. Listen, okay, please support us. We're going to have ad-free listening, early access to the series.

3:34And starting in October, we'll be releasing a bonus episode every week for our founding members. So sign up now for TheRestIsPoliticsUS.com. Katty is way better at this. I mean, I thought I was a good salesman, but I got to tell you, you're just blowing me away with these promos. Okay, on with today's show. Both of us, Anthony, have had a couple of days to digest that debate. You may have come off your sugar high. We'll probably have to have another look at the Scaramucci lollipop by the end of this episode, which is fine. I will give you one more week to show it off. But I've had a really interesting few conversations over the last two days since the debate with democratic strategists, with a very interesting woman who is actually a Labour party pollster for Keir Starmer in the UK, Deborah Mattinson, who's been over in the US helping the Harris campaign with some focus groups, and also with a couple of American strategists I know.

4:31And I think there was a strong sense that Kamala Harris won that debate. There's questions about the impact the debate will have on the actual election. And there is also a kind of awareness, I think, that Donald Trump lost the debate as well as Kamala Harris winning it, and that there were certain areas of her messaging which she still has not got right, got strong and kind of forceful and crisp enough to make a sale to that, whatever they are, 100 ,000 voters who are going to make the difference in this election. I mean, this is going to be such a tight election. And there's kind of whatever we used to say, there's a couple of Taylor Swift's concerts worth of people who are going to make the final choice.

5:15And the area that I feel, and I'd love your take on this, because I know you've been kind of in contact a lot with the campaign, is that she just has not really finalized that message on the single biggest issue of this election, and that's the economy. And that Kamala Harris's background as a prosecutor has made her very comfortable on some areas. She was very comfortable on abortion. She's very comfortable on kind of justice and law issues, gun control, but she doesn't really have the background of kind of economics as her sort of political passion point. And I think that's still something she's going to have to work on if she's going to persuade those voters who are sitting on the fence.

5:58I do feel like I'm sort of the Democrats' angel of doom at the moment. Yeah, I don't think you're the Democratic angel of doom. And I'm going to say some things, And this is why, you know, we'll probably end up getting canceled at some point, Katty, because, you know, I'm going to say things that people don't like in our current culture. But Donald Trump got elected because we had a black man by the name of Barack Obama as president for eight years. OK. And Van Jones, you and I both know Van. He worked for Obama. He's now a CNN commentator. The night that Trump got elected, he said this was a whitelash.

6:31And so Donald Trump blew the dog whistles and said, come out for me. if you're mad that a black man was in the White House, right? We named it the White House. So, white people are supposed to live in the White House. So, Donald Trump blows the dog whistle, come out and vote for me. He wins the presidency. It was a white lash. Van Jones's words, not mine. So, Donald Trump has great political instincts and everything I'm about to say is totally inappropriate, but I want you to hear it. So, Donald Trump goes back after getting destroyed in that debate because he was ill-prepared. And he says, okay, I've got Roy Cohn's playbook.

7:07Okay. And so for listeners outside the United States, who is Roy Cohn? Roy Cohn was Donald Trump's lawyer. He was a very, very ruthless man. He was the lawyer for Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare in the 1950s. And he was a take no prisoners attitude. And Fred Trump, Donald Trump's father said, go to Roy Cohn, he's going to mentor you. And Roy Cohn turned him into a ruthless SOB. and three things that Roy said to Donald Trump. Never apologize to anyone about anything. Never admit defeat under any circumstances, no matter what happens. It's 21 to zero. Don't admit defeat. I deny the fact that you lost an election.

7:46And then the third thing is no matter what other people are saying about you, go with your instincts. So let me tell you what Trump's instincts are right now. It's a team of one. He's talking to himself. There's probably like five people inside of his brain. And they're all having a committee meeting right now. And he's saying, you know what? This is a sexist country. I didn't win that debate, but I'm going to tell all my base that I won the debate. I'm going to go on Sean Hannity's show immediately after the debate because I obviously lost it. And I'm going to say that I crushed her and her campaign is over.

8:15And he's going to use the prop that, oh, she's asking for the rematch, only losing fighters or UFC fighters would ask for a rematch. She didn't win the debate. Why would she be asking for a rematch. And then the last thing he's saying is I'm going to go hard, super hard at my base, and I'm going to find moderates that are actually sexist, that don't like the idea that there could be a woman running the United States. And so whether people like this or not, that is Trump's strategy. Okay. And I'm going to say two last things quickly. The assassination attempt, if I'm being brutally honest and I'm grading both of us, we both got it wrong.

8:54We sat there in July, looked at each other and said, this is going to change the election. That picture of him is going to ascend him to the presidency. Katty Kay, it had virtually no impact on the polling. It's had virtually no impact on anything. And now we're at the debate. And some people like Frank Lunds, a famous political pollster here in the United States said, this debate is going to win Kamala Harris the election. But I'm here to tell you that that debate is like the assassination attempt. It's going to last a few moments in time. It's helped her. It's helped her with the fundraising.

9:28And something happened this morning that we need to tell people, Democratic registrations are off. They were boom when she got the nomination and they were rising. But in the last three days, they've trended downward. That's a problem for her. And she needs, whether she likes it or not, she and Walt need more media time. They got to get out there more. This guy, J.D. Vance, I was trading the PPI numbers this morning because I do have a day job. And so I'm watching J.D. Vance on CNBC. And I said, this son of a bitch, I got to give him credit. He's on CNBC. He's lying through his teeth that Trump won the debate.

10:08And he's lying through his teeth about the tariffs. And he's lying through his teeth about the economic policies. And by the way, he knows better. Yeah, of course he does. And he knows better. And he's lying through his teeth about all these ridiculous things. But the gall to go on CNBC and lie through his teeth and push back on the journalists is a winning strategy, Caddy. So guys, if you want to win this thing, you got to get in the flow. One thing that JD Vance said this morning that was true, he said to Joe Kernan, the anchor, he said, she's got to come into the process, the American journalism process and answer questions.

10:44Easy questions, hard questions, All of them. Medium questions? Any questions. Just get out there. Any questions. You got to do it because if you don't do it, people are going to be like, what is she doing? I agree. We got it wrong on that assassination. And I think we were both kind of, you know, we looked at that photo and it was such an iconic photo and his moment of strength and the fight, fight, fight. And also, by the way, that was when he was up against Joe Biden. So to give us a little bit of slack there, it was a kind of different era in politics. But I had this text. I flew overnight from the States to London and I had this text from a very good democratic strategist who basically texted me, same swing states, same undecided voters, and same lack of clarity.

11:22And that was her kind of, you know, couple of days later analysis of Kamala Harris's problem. And it's true. It's still, there are still those undecided voters. And as we know, not very many Americans will watch the whole 90 minutes. I know this had record ratings and they said it had 60 million, but whether people are actually tuning in for the whole thing, mostly what they're seeing in the clips afterwards. And what I'm hearing from people who really want her to win, I mean, Jim Messina, who famously managed Barack Obama's re-election against you and Mitt Romney, you personally and Mitt Romney back in 2012.

11:57They ate our lunch, actually. They ate your lunch. I was on Morning Joe with him the day after the debate. And he was obviously saying she did a great job and we were all very impressed by her performance. And like you said, Anthony, she went through the playbook and she remembered everything and she prosecuted the case against him. But what his concern was, was still the lack of clarity on the single issue that ever since this election campaign has started, there has not been a single poll that has not showed us that cost of living, inflation, affordability, whatever you want to call it, is Americans' number one concern.

12:33So why is she not doing that, Katty? Look, it's not her wheelhouse. Her wheelhouse is law and justice and abortion rights. She's not Bernie Sanders who had Medicare for all, right? He had a very strong, clear populist economic message. She's not Elizabeth Warren who had corporate greed. Again, strong, clear economic message. She's not Donald Trump who had immigration. Strong, clear kind of message that he tied, yes, to cultural issues, but he's also tying it to the economy. And she has not developed. And maybe it's just because she's only been there for six weeks. Maybe it's because her team does not get how critical this is.

13:12And yet, focus group after focus group, Deborah Mattinson, who's one of Keir Starmer's pollsters and advisors, said she had had focus groups with people who are going through supermarkets. And as they're putting stuff into their basket, they're putting in orange juice, they're putting in milk, they're putting in eggs, and they're calculating on their phones how much it costs, and they get to the checkout and they put stuff back because they can't afford it. And that's the reality that a lot of these voters who are going to decide this election are dealing with. And until she comes up with a clear and crisp and passionate message, and I think standing there on stage saying, I believe in the middle class, I grew up in the middle class, I have a plan, it's not enough.

13:53Now, the one thing that Deborah Mattinson said when she focus group people And I asked her, you know, okay, so of the proposals that Kamala Harris has laid out so far, are there any of them that are resonating with these, what she calls hero voters, the voters who will decide the election? Are there any of those proposals? And the one that she said, which I don't think you're going to like very much because a lot of economists and finance people don't like it, was the promise to stop price gouging by supermarkets, which got slammed by democratic economists who worked for Barack Obama. Centrist Democrats didn't like that plan at all, but it is the single proposal that she has come up with.

14:32The$25 ,000 for new homeowners apparently is not resonating with them. It's not an easy one for her because her background is not in that field, but she's surrounded by smart people. And I think if they don't come up with a clear answer to this one compelling question, then however much people dislike Donald Trump's character, they have a nostalgia for the economy under Donald Trump. I mean, fair or unfair, they look back and they think, oh, I could go to the supermarket and put stuff in my basket and I didn't have to take some of it out again at the end of the shopping run. So let me test you.

15:10Damn, I hate these moments. Yeah, but not bad testing, like the way you embarrass me with all these trivia things. I haven't done one for a while, actually. I think I need another trivia thing. I want you to respond to some of these things, okay? Yes. Whose fault is the inflation? And so I know that it's situational. I know that if Trump had won the election, we'd have Trump inflation. I know that these things are cyclical. Does the American public know that? Whose fault is the inflation? It gets pinned on whoever's in government and it doesn't really matter whose fault it is. Yeah, of course it's supply chain.

15:41Of course it's high interest rates. Of course it's pumping. And to some extent, yeah, maybe it is the Biden administration because they pumped so much money into the American economy. There may be an element of that to which they owe this. Hold on. The pump started in March of 2020 under the Trump administration. So you can't blame it on Biden himself. But I don't think it matters whose fault it is. It exists under them and therefore they own it. Let me say it differently then. If it doesn't matter whose fault it is. I mean, of course it matters. It just doesn't matter to voters as they're deciding who to pull it.

16:13I understand. But if I'm on watch and inflation is happening on my watch, am I pinned with it? Yes or no? Yes. Okay. And so therefore, can I unpin myself with the American voters? Can I come up with a strategy to unpin myself with the American voters? And so I believe you can. Okay. And I believe that you could message the people and I believe you can go on Bloomberg, CNN, MSR, you pick the messages. So, okay, guys, here's the chart. The federal government put$3 trillion of cash into the economy to save people when they were locked in their homes. The Federal Reserve dropped interest rates to zero, which caused another$4 trillion to get dumped into the economy.

16:53The supply chain broke. Supply chain broke. And so we had less goods and services in the economy and more money in the economy. Of course, we were going to get inflation. This started in the Trump administration. No fault of Donald Trump's, by the way. I'm not here to blame him. And it's no fault of ours. We're trying to save the economy. Here are the things that Joe Biden and I have done to slow down the inflation. Here are the things that we've done to improve your bridges, roads, and tunnels. And we put$250 billion into manufacturing and reshoring. And oh, by the way, let me show you this wage data for lower and middle income people.

17:32Okay. And she's not doing that. And she's got to get out there and do that. And she's got to say, oh, and you know what? Over the next six months is going to be better. If you stay the course with me in the next two years, it's going to be even better. If you go with Mr. Tariff, Tariff Trump, you're going to have 20 % tariffs, 100 % tariffs. and you want to talk about regressive taxation, if you're lower middle income, he's stealing the money from you. And it's going to drive up inflation and crash the dollar potentially. The way they handled the price gouging speech, the only thing people heard were price controls.

18:06That's the only thing they heard. So 37 states have price gouging laws. Many of them are conservative red states. And what are those set up for? Kat, I don't want to bore you with monopoly power and inelastic pricing, but let me just say a few simple things. If I control all of the product and the consumer needs the product and there's no competitor, I can jack the prices on the consumer. That's unfair to the consumer. The monopoly laws came into power actually in Renaissance Italy. People said, okay, we can't allow for that. in the 1890s, we had the Sherman Antitrust Act in the United States.

18:46We got to bust these things up. They get too big. We had one company, I think you guys had British Telecom in the UK. We had AT &T controlled every phone line, every phone call, every phone piece of equipment in the United States up until 1984. It was under the conservative Ronald Reagan, he broke up AT &T. And the great irony is the breaking up of AT &T unleashed all this innovation and we ended up with Google and Facebook and all this stuff because AT &T was sitting on all that tech. They wouldn't let it out because they had a monopoly and they were controlling prices through the monopoly. Vice President Harris, all she has to say to people is, look, when you have a monopoly or you have five food companies controlling the food, they control the prices.

19:30It's not fair to the consumer. I am all about market prices, but they're manipulating the prices on their side. I'm not trying to manipulate the prices. I'm trying to create fairness for the consumer in the freest possible market. You see what I mean? And by the way, my rhetoric just now probably sucked a little bit, but you got to get reps in. It's like training your body. You got to get reps in. You go, okay, that interview sucked. Let me go to the next interview. Let me tighten up my language. and all of a sudden, two weeks from now, bam, she's on point on these messages. She did a week of debate prep and she was good, right?

20:06She was on message. She was sharp. She had her lines down. She was confident. She delivered super well. She didn't forget the lines that she was going to deliver. So it shows that it does work. I mean, I think of all of the things that you said that she should go on CNBC and the other business channels and say, It's that the thing that actually moves the dial with focus groups and polls is the very last bit. It's not what happened beforehand. It's not what they've done up until now. I think keeping telling people that she could easily get pinned with Bidenomics, stop telling people that what they did has helped them when they're still going through the supermarket and they can't afford to pay for their groceries.

20:45Tell them what is going to make it better in the next six months to a year. And I think that's where she's falling down. Okay, before we sound like we're getting super negative on what she's doing, there are a couple of things I think that she did well in that debate that she can also carry on with messaging. And I wanted to get your sense of those. One of them was that towards the end of the debate, when Trump was asked about 2020, and whether he thought he had won the election, and he clearly said that he thought he had won the election, and that he was only being sarcastic when he said that he hadn't.

21:18And she gave what I thought was a very good rebuke of that because she tied his delusion or lying about the 2020 election to his mental fitness for office. And basically what she said is, listen, this guy either believes genuinely that he won the 2020 election, although all the facts and the lawyers and the courts have said otherwise, or he's pretending to believe it, but he's not up to the job cognitively. Do you trust somebody who is so delusioned about something as clear and obvious as 2020 with the realms of government? And I thought that was her comment on abortion has got so much attention.

22:00And it was a very powerful comment. And the fact that he refused to commit himself to saying that he wouldn't veto a national abortion ban, I think is a problem for him. But actually, I think this answer where she kind of brought it home that he either doesn't grasp or he ignores facts. And therefore, what would he do if he was having to negotiate with Congress? What would he do if he was having to negotiate with Putin? What would he do if he was having to negotiate with Kim Jong-un or with the Iranians? How would you trust him to have the real grasp of the facts if he doesn't get the facts of 2020?

22:34How can he govern? And I thought actually, I thought that was one of her most compelling features in this debate. And the fact that she went into it, as you said, well-prepped, well-versed on top of the subject. I mean, if this was a job interview for CEO, which of those two candidates would you have given the CEO's job for? Because if you want to be president of the United States, you have to prep, you have to know the facts, you have to be mentally agile, you have to be facile. And she proved herself, I think, better at all of those things. So I thought she did well there. I thought that was a point in her favor that will potentially help with those groups of voters who are still sitting on the fence, all three of them.

23:12Okay. So now I'm really going to get in trouble. Okay. You ready? Because I've got the big butt. Okay. I've got the big butt. I was trying to end on a little, oops. No, but everything you said is totally true and she should be the president and I've obviously endorsed her, but ready? Yes. But she is a woman, Katty K. And this is not 1979 and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, this is a sexist country. She is a woman. And so you know this about this country, you got to go 10 steps higher than any man. Any country. Any country, but definitely this one, she's a woman. And so to me, I would say there are three things that she's got to hammer into her campaign or strategist and herself.

23:57Sanity. You're making a choice between sanity and insanity, a dog eating, cat eating, election denying, orange lunatic who's 78 years old in mental decline. So sanity versus insanity. Freedom. Michael Lewis, the very famous author is writing about the federal government right now. And he's aghast that Donald Trump wants to fire 50 ,000 federal employees, rehire people that take a loyalty test to him and politicize the government, the government that's worked so successfully for us by not being politicized. Okay. You may not like certain aspects of the government and certainly it could become more efficient, but the government has led to the most prosperous economy or been part of the most prosperous economy, one of the most exceptional countries in the world.

24:51And so don't break it. Okay. Don't break it. Okay. So freedom. Okay. That would include reproductive freedom. It would do not politicizing things that shouldn't be politicized. And then the last thing is middle-class growth. Okay. The orange guy that I'm running against has done nothing to expand the middle class. Let's go over the Biden-Harris strategy and let's talk about what we've actually done to help the people that are aggrieved with the system. So I'm saying you You get more freedom and you get more growth. And if you don't believe me, ask Goldman Sachs. And by the way, I know you're a progressive and Goldman Sachs is a big, ugly, bad bank, but I applaud her for bringing it up in the debate.