michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” [MUSIC PLAYING] This week, two different high profile Democrats may be late entries to the Democratic race.

michelle goldberg

How much of a bubble do you have to be in to think that the way to juice turnout among people of color is to nominate the guy who presided over stop-and-frisk in New York?

david leonhardt

Then we talk about the resistance inside the Trump White House.

michelle goldberg

You can see that there are really good, patriotic, competent people who have tried to keep the functioning of American power somewhat on track.

david leonhardt

And, finally, a recommendation.

ross douthat

If I can’t convince my colleagues to become full-tilt, boogie, Roman Catholics, maybe I can convince them to believe in ghosts.

david leonhardt

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York, has signaled that he will in fact run for president. Deval Patrick may also be a late entry into the race. He’s a former governor of Massachusetts with ties to the Obama administration. It’s a sign of just how anxious some Democrats are about the field’s three front runners — Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. Could Bloomberg and Patrick shake up the race? I want to lay out a scenario for how they could do so. But, first, let’s talk about the reasons that all three of us are somewhat skeptical about both Bloomberg and Patrick. Michelle, what do you think?

michelle goldberg

O.K., so we’ve talked about this on this show before that, if you kind of divide the electorate into quadrants based on their conservatism on economic issues and on social issues, the most sparsely populated quadrant is socially liberal and economically conservative, right? That’s like a very popular combination maybe among people in our milieu in the beltway, but it’s extremely unpopular in the country at large. And how much of a bubble do you have to be in to think that the way to juice turnout among people of color is to nominate the guy who presided over stop-and-frisk in New York? Or how much of a bubble you have to be in to think that the guy who’s going to win back white, working class voters is a billionaire mostly known for — you know, the one thing I admire about him is his work on gun control. But the idea that he has kind of any broad appeal outside of the Acela corridor I just think is bananas.

david leonhardt

Your descriptions there are about Bloomberg. Deval Patrick is a little bit different, but he’s also similar in some ways.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, Deval Patrick is a little bit different. Although, I also think that, first of all, he has these very problematic ties to Bain Capital, which is the same private equity firm that Romney was slammed for his involvement with. But, also, I just think, if people wanted a moderate, pro-business, socially liberal, African-American candidate, there are some in the race already. And I do think that there’s this idea that these top three that people are unsatisfied about or that kind of consultants are unsatisfied about — because polls show that most Democrats are pretty satisfied with the field — but it’s not that people are choosing these top three because they don’t have other options. They’re choosing them because they’re actually the ones that they want.

ross douthat

Yeah, I mean I almost completely agree with Michelle. I think, if you were playing devil’s advocate, what you would say is that we’ve watched the non-top-three candidates run their campaigns, and they haven’t caught fire. Cory Booker hasn’t caught fire. Amy Klobuchar hasn’t caught fire. And, therefore, even though figures like Bloomberg and Patrick are sort of ideologically in spaces that maybe are already occupied, they could reasonably say, well, maybe I can run a better moderate, business friendly campaign than the people who are running it to date. But, fundamentally, I don’t think there’s any reason to think that’s the case for either of them and probably especially for Bloomberg who presents as, yeah, sort of the embodiment of that elite-dominated, otherwise empty political quadrant. And, basically, if you’re Michael Bloomberg, and you’re worried that the leading Democratic contenders are going to throw the election to Donald Trump, it would make a lot more sense to say I’m going to endorse Amy Klobuchar. I’m going to endorse Cory Booker. I’m going to give tons and tons of support to one of those candidates. I mean, as much as we can say Klobuchar hasn’t run a great campaign to date relative to the others, does anybody think that Michael Bloomberg is a better candidate for the Midwest than Amy Klobuchar?

david leonhardt

No, I don’t. I don’t. But, before we get to why I could see a path for Bloomberg or Patrick, Michelle, I want to ask you something, which is you said that you think Democrats are satisfied with the candidates. And I know there’s this Gallup poll that says to Democrats, are you satisfied with the candidates? And a large percentage of them say yes, something like 75 percent. But, to me, there just really are a lot of people out there who either they look at Sanders and Warren, and they say those people are too left wing for me, or— and this is a little bit how I feel. I say they’re a little bit too left wing for me, but I’m actually more worried about the fact that they show no real interest in appealing to swing voters at all. And so I worry about their electability. Then another category is people who look at Joe Biden, and they say, oh my goodness, he just doesn’t look like he’s up for the rigors of this. And so I guess I do think, whether it’s an undercurrent or not, there really is a significant number of Democrats out there who aren’t thrilled with this field for one reason or another. Do you disagree with that?

michelle goldberg

Well, I would say they’re not thrilled with the front runners, and that’s different. But I absolutely think there’s been a kind of crisis of confidence in the last two weeks. People have really panicked about The New York Times/Siena poll. They’ve panicked about Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare For All proposal. These three are leading not because there’s not for lack of other options, right? They’re leading because, despite what some of us might think, they’re the ones who are speaking to a majority of potential primary voters. And so just kind of putting more people in the mix is not going to change that. I mean, what I think — I agree with Ross. Again, this is a bizarre segment because Ross and I are in almost total agreement that the people who are so freaked out about the front runners should pick someone else in this field and get behind them.

david leonhardt

So here’s the path that I could see for Bloomberg or probably, more likely, Patrick. All of this involves Biden being weak, right? If Biden is actually stronger than we all think and can essentially just hold his lead and kind of limp to the nomination, the same way we’ve seen other Democrats over the years do it— but, if that doesn’t happen, first of all, Patrick has a lot of name recognition in New Hampshire. So, if we come out of Iowa, and Biden basically looks really weak, you could imagine a moment where moderates panicking with the current state of their options essentially see someone like Patrick as a new hope. And the fact that he has two big advantages in two of the first four states — in New Hampshire, it’s next door to Massachusetts where he was a two-term governor. And, in South Carolina, he’s African-American in a state that has a very large voting bloc that is African-American.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, but I don’t understand. I actually don’t see his advantage in South Carolina because it hasn’t been much of an advantage so far for Kamala Harris or Cory Booker. I don’t see why they would automatically go to Deval Patrick, as opposed to these two candidates who have been there and been meeting them and have built organizations.

david leonhardt

Yep, I think it’s a fair question. I think the answer would be Patrick would sort of have to catch fire for a few weeks, the way can happen in politics. I’m not at all saying it’s likely. I guess I just do think you could imagine someone who, maybe not fairly, but feels fresh and feels new and, for that reason, is sort of able to rally moderates to a single candidate, rather than having them split out.

ross douthat

So I don’t think that scenario is crazy in the sense that you could imagine a scenario where let’s say Biden doesn’t perform terribly, but still ends up finishing not second, but third or fourth in both New Hampshire and Iowa. And, meanwhile, Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders, one of them wins one state, and one of them wins the other. And, at that moment, I think there are a lot of Democrats who would look at a Buttigieg-Sanders contest for the nomination and want a third option. What I don’t quite see is what makes Deval Patrick a fresh face at that moment if he is getting into the race now.

david leonhardt

I mean, Ross, with the scenario that you spun out a minute ago where you said Sanders wins one of the first two states, and Buttigieg wins one, I actually don’t think that leaves room for Bloomberg or Patrick, right? I think their scenario has to involve Sanders and Warren winning the early states. I think, in that scenario or a scenario where Biden holds up well, one of those two becomes a much more stronger moderate vehicle.

ross douthat

I mean, maybe I’m underestimating Buttigieg, but I agree with you that a scenario where Bernie wins the first two states is maybe optimal for the Deval Patrick hypothetical. But I’m just pretty skeptical of Mayor Pete’s ability to sort of consolidate 40 percent or 50 percent of the primary electorate and to be the person who’s fighting Sanders or Warren in this scenario all the way to the convention.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, I mean I would totally agree. And I’ve heard African-American writers express some real frustration about this. I mean, in a way, it’s almost insulting to talk about somebody as a likely candidate who has almost no African-American support. Just you cannot win the Democratic nomination without that.

ross douthat

Right, I mean, you can. It’s not impossible. But the idea that you would just automatically consolidate the field to two — I mean, I think in that scenario — I think the scenario where Bernie wins one, and Buttigieg wins the other, I think the most likely thing is that Biden really retains life. And this is — I mean, this is Michelle mentioned this already. But this is the question hanging over all of this that there’s an assumption from watching Biden and seeing him struggle on the stump. There’s an assumption that his 20 percent to 25 percent support must be soft and must be looking for another option. And it could just be that there’s a quarter of the Democratic electorate that really wants to vote for Joe Biden, even if he seems too old.

michelle goldberg

Although, can I just push again— I would say that the argument against that is that he’s so weak in the states that are seeing the most of him, right? So it’s like, the more people see of him, the less confident they become.

david leonhardt

Ross, I know you were really fascinated by this Times/Siena poll that Michelle mentioned earlier and particularly how it dug in to undecided voters and potentially swing voters. And the way I would summarize it is that a lot of the white, working class voters who swung from Obama to Trump and then swung back to the Democrats in 2018 — the argument of Nate Cohn who wrote the pieces about the poll is that a lot of those voters are going to vote for Trump again, even if they voted for the 2018 congressional candidates. And, if you buy that, I’d be interested in what you think is the smartest strategy for Democrats to be thinking about at this point.

ross douthat

Yeah, I mean, what’s really interesting about some of Nate’s data is that it suggests that there is a constituency that’s moderate, but turned off by social and cultural liberalism that’s up for grabs in this election. But it’s not the constituency necessarily of older white people who voted for Obama and then voted for Trump, which is the group that we’ve spent all this time talking about. It’s actually a younger, more male and often minority Hispanic and African-American constituency that is sort of technically left of center, doesn’t share the sort of upper class liberal revulsion at Trump, likes certain things about Trump, presumably likes the strong economy, and is sort of culturally alienated from progressive discourse in various ways. It doesn’t change my baseline view, which is that I assume the Democratic Party is going to run to the left of where it was running in 2016. If it’s doing that, it has to choose between trying to reassure upper-middle-class suburbanites that it’s not going to hit their pocketbooks too hard or trying to reassure voters maybe like these younger male voters that it’s not fully beholden to cultural progressivism. But I think the danger zone for Democrats is where they’re perceived as sort of maximalists on left-wing economic policy and maximalists on whatever sort of woke progressive culture represents. And that’s the trap they have to avoid. They have to be seen as sort of swinging to the center in one place or the other.

david leonhardt

Michelle, you should take the last word here. I mean, given how panicked you and I are about the notion of a second Trump term, what is it you hope Democrats do to maximize their odds of winning?

michelle goldberg

I mean, I honestly don’t know how to answer that because I sort of feel like, to me, the primary, in a sense, is going to show us which candidates have the potential to excite large numbers of people. And it might not be the candidates that people who talk on cable TV for a living get excited about. I also think that we should consider— and I’m not honestly sure what the answer is. But I think it’s worth considering, with some of these billionaires, whether they’re worried that Elizabeth Warren will lose or whether they’re worried that she’ll win. But I think that, if she pulls this out, if she wins these early states, that is in itself a sign that she’s able to speak to large numbers of people in the American electorate, not that the Democratic Party electorate in these primary states is totally representative, but it’s really the best metric we have.

ross douthat

I think there’s a lot of polling that suggests that Medicare For All could be an albatross for Democrats. But I think that it’s very likely the Elizabeth Warren position that Michael Bloomberg hates the most is her wealth tax, which is not likely to be a political problem for Democrats in the general election. And I think there is an obvious way it would help Warren to have someone standing on stage, running against her, to whom she can directly say I’m going to tax you, Mr. Bloomberg. I think that’s a good moment for her. And I think she should relish the opportunity. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

And, on that note, we will leave this discussion and come right back. [MUSIC PLAYING] One year ago, a Trump administration official wrote an anonymous op-ed for The Times, describing the chaos inside the White House and the internal efforts to thwart Trump’s agenda. That same official now has a book out. It’s a damaging portrayal of the president. At one point, it likens Trump to “your elderly uncle running around pants-less and cursing loudly.” The book also contains a kind of mea culpa, acknowledging that the so-called quiet resistance inside the administration is not doing a very good job of constraining Trump. Ross, shortly after Trump’s election in 2016, you wrote that, for the good of the country, serious Republicans, even those who had been very critical of his campaign, should go work for him and try to restrain him. Do you still think that was the right choice for them? And can those resisters still play a positive role today?

ross douthat

Well, those are separate questions, right? There was— once Donald Trump was elected president, there was no way he was not going to be president for at least most of his first term. And the presidency is an awesomely powerful office. And Trump was, by general agreement, unfit for it, certainly totally unprepared for it. And there were a lot of ways in which it was much, much better for the United States to have Jim Mattis running the Department of Defense, rather than Newt Gingrich, to just pick sort of one particularly extreme example of how these things cashed out. As figures like Mattis and other lower level figures who were, I think, fairly responsible actors have departed, the White House has become more incompetent, more chaotic, and also worse in terms of specific policy outcomes with the sort of debacle on the Turkish-Syrian border being just sort of a prime example. And the anonymous op-ed writer has gotten a lot of grief I think for how he has or she has approached this. And I think the grief is understandable. I think the original op-ed made no sense at all, that, if you’re sort of working inside the White House to constrain the president, announcing that you’re doing so anonymously in The New York Times is basically just like injecting more paranoia and chaos into the system you’re trying to control. But I think for an anonymous Trump official to say, basically, don’t reelect this guy is a reasonable use of sort of the power that you assume when you work in the administration. So, in that sense, I think it’s sort of defensible to say I worked for this guy. I tried to constrain him. I feel the constraints have failed. He’s up for re-election. Don’t vote for him.

david leonhardt

I guess my view is that, unless people put names and faces to it, unless they’re willing to come out and do it in a courageous way, not behind a veil of anonymity, I don’t think it’s going to persuade anyone who’s currently a Trump supporter. And so, to me, I’m not impressed by this. I am impressed by the people from within the State Department and other parts of the bureaucracy who are willing to risk their reputations and become the subject of these scurrilous, false, nasty attacks to testify about what Trump has done on Ukraine. But I don’t know. Michelle, do you think there is a positive role for the anonymous descriptions of the chaos inside the White House?

michelle goldberg

Well, I think part of the problem is that, from my understanding of the book and at least the excerpts that have been released so far, it doesn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know. I mean, look, I think there’s positive, whatever chips away at this nightmare, but, first of all, this person could obviously do a lot more good by going public at this point. And they also could do a lot more good if they told us something that is new. And the Ukraine scandal has been, I think, a sign of how much we don’t know. I do have to say that the parade of people kind of from the bureaucracy coming forward, giving testimony, has actually challenged my earlier view that there is no excuse for anybody to work with or be complicit in this administration because you can see that there are really good, patriotic, competent people who have tried to keep the functioning of American power somewhat on track in the midst of this maelstrom. But I also think that what Ross said before about how things were kind of better when you had these kind of competent figures in positions of power is almost an argument against them because I think what they allowed us to do is to become acclimated to something that we shouldn’t become acclimated to, right, because it sort of held together for the first couple of years, even as the shocks got bigger and bigger and bigger. And now the country has sort of lost the ability to respond appropriately. In three years, they’ve taken what was a flawed but great republic and just let it devolve into another squalid oligarchy. We are never going to be the country that we were again. And, when I think about all the people that provided cover — Tillerson, Kelly, Mattis, all these people who reportedly know what Trump is, but are not speaking out, you know, Dina Powell, all of them — the amount of shame that should fall on their shoulders, again, is just monumental.

ross douthat

I guess — I mean, I disagree. Or I would put it this way. I think it’s reasonable for people to be upset at figures like Mattis. I mean, I think what Mattis has done since he left DoD is sort of retreat into the position that he’s a military man, and the military shouldn’t speak out against an elected president, which I think is generally correct. But, when he took that job, he was taking a civilian job. He was not occupying a military office. And so he played a civilian role in the functioning of the republic. And, if he thinks, as I think he manifestly does think, that Donald Trump should not be re-elected, then I think there is a pretty good argument that he has an obligation to speak out and not just crack jokes about Trump at the Al Smith dinner. I think, though, on the question about people serving in the first place, I guess I prize the world not descending into a maelstrom of violence more than I fear the sort of normalization that that creates. Like I don’t want Jared Kushner alone in charge of U.S. foreign policy.

michelle goldberg

Right, I guess, my point — yeah, and I’m certainly not saying that it’s worth letting the world devolve into a maelstrom of violence in order to show how bad Trump is.

ross douthat

Well, that was — I was being extreme. I was being extreme. But so were you.

michelle goldberg

So, no, my point is that I actually think that like, if we think back to the early months of the Trump administration when there was still a lot of shock and I think more of a will to resist among Republicans, I think that, if he had tried some of what he’s done lately then, he would have been shut down much more quickly. And then, beyond national security, how do you explain a Gary Cohn or some of these other figures? There’s certainly no honor in basically letting Trump pay off rich people with a tax cut enough to create some sort of stability and then slinking away and going back on the Davos circuit, as he burns the republic to the ground.

ross douthat

But Trump’s — but Trump’s tax cut was the most normal thing that he did in his entire administration. And Cohn, I mean —

michelle goldberg

Right, and, by engineering that, by engineering that, he bought himself a lot of time.

ross douthat

But Cohn’s argument would be I was preventing Trump from pulling out of NAFTA and starting 16 different trade wars and pitching the U.S. into a recession. And where I agree is that I think your obligation to serve in this administration diminishes the further you get from the powers of life and death, from military power. But guys like Cohn and Mnuchin, people who are —

michelle goldberg

Well, look, Mnuchin is just a weasel, right? I mean, the idea that Mnuchin has any loyalty to this country or his fellow citizens, you know, you don’t even expect it of him. But Cohn does at least present himself as a somewhat kind of upstanding citizen, instead of just like a slimy, third-rate grifter. And so I don’t see why he should be treated any differently. There’s just — fine, if he’s going to excuse what he did in this administration by saying he held things together, then it’s incumbent on him to speak out now. And the fact that he’s not speaking out now suggests that maybe he doesn’t think it’s that bad or just cares more about his political connections than the future of the country.

david leonhardt

Ross, you mentioned Mattis a couple of minutes ago. And I do think Mattis is a really interesting case because Mattis has an independent reputation. Unlike Lieutenant Colonel Vindman who was not at all a famous figure coming into the last few weeks, Mattis was. And I’ve been just really struck by his lack of courage about this. And what’s interesting to me is I think his excuse that you don’t criticize a sitting president if you’re in the military — I don’t even think that’s honest because Mattis did in fact criticize Barack Obama when Barack Obama was president. And so I feel like, in the end, Mattis is emblematic of people who have served Trump and are now just basically making excuses for why they won’t criticize him. And I assume what they’re hiding is the fact that they’re Republicans, and they don’t want to burn down their reputation among other Republicans. And I just find the contrast between their lack of courage and the courage of people like Vindman who have been willing to come forward to be quite striking. And I guess I put Anonymous closer to the camp of people who are unwilling to criticize the president because, like Mattis, he’s essentially protecting his reputation.

ross douthat

Well, except that, with Anonymous, let me continue to play devil’s advocate. We don’t know who Anonymous is.

david leonhardt

That’s correct.

ross douthat

So, if Anonymous is someone who most readers of The New York Times, to say nothing of most Americans, wouldn’t recognize, by speaking out anonymously, they’re actually inflating their audience and inflating the attention. Trump has a narrative around his presidency that basically defends his corruptions and misbehavior by saying, look, there’s a deep state that has opposed my policies from the get go and has always been out to get me. And there is a danger in sort of figures associated with the deep state creating this united front against Trump that all it does is ratify that narrative. I’m not saying that that’s an argument for Mattis in particular, who does have this I think unique reputation, not speaking out. But, if you’re sort of a lower-level figure — I guess I agree with you about Mattis generally. I think there are some challenges here in terms of both how functionaries dealing with a president who they think is unfit approach their job and what actually serves the common good versus what just plays into Trump’s narratives. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

Now it is time for us to turn to our weekly recommendation when we suggest something to help take your mind off of the news. Ross, this week is your turn. What do you have for us?

ross douthat

Well, I have something suitably strange and pretty far off politics. One of my pet projects is to, if I can’t convince my colleagues to become full-tilt, boogie, Roman Catholics, maybe I can convince them to believe in ghosts. And so I’m going to recommend a book by a journalist named Will Storr that came out I guess 13 years ago now called “Will Storr vs. The Supernatural— One Man’s Search for the Truth About Ghosts.” And Storr is an interesting writer. He does a lot of books that are sort of he hangs out with cranks and charlatans and weirdos of various kinds and writes sort of sympathetically but skeptically about them. And so this is a version of that for exorcists, ghost hunters, and people who sort of follow the supernatural. I think the book is a really good introduction from a journalist who is pretty skeptical about these things and to the sheer weirdness that exists once you take a step into some of these realms, which I don’t recommend doing by the way. I’m a little hesitant here because I think too much interest in these things is itself unhealthy. And, you know, the book ends with some sort of theological speculation that I totally disagree with and find frustrating. But it’s an interesting book.

david leonhardt

And what’s the short version of why I shouldn’t just dismiss the supernatural?

ross douthat

I mean, the short version is that I think, if you immerse yourself in the literature about hauntings, demonic possession, and the whole range of things, you might find yourself less skeptical about it than you are right now.

david leonhardt

Michelle, what’s your take on the supernatural?

michelle goldberg

I mean, I just feel like, if it was real, how come it only seems like the only people who find it are the people who go looking for it so devoutly, right? Like I feel like, if it was real, it would just kind of pop up on the radar from time to time.

ross douthat

Again, I think this — you know, this book is just one, tiny piece of a much larger puzzle, but I think there are plenty of people who encounter the supernatural who don’t actually go looking for it and who have sort of strange, life-changing experiences that aren’t just explained by their obsessive interest in the subject. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that people who try and contact spirits from beyond the grave would be more likely to get in touch with spirits from beyond the grave. You’ve got to make the effort, which, again, I do not recommend doing. [LAUGHTER]

david leonhardt

One of the things I’ve realized as I’ve aged is that I should have more of an open mind to things that I initially find ridiculous, but that large numbers of other people find deeply appealing. And this certainly falls into the category. So, Ross, what is the recommendation again?

ross douthat

It is a book entitled “Will Storr vs. The Supernatural— One Man’s Search for the Truth About Ghosts.” [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

That’s our show this week. Thanks so much for listening. If you have thoughts or ideas, leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. You can also email us at argument@nytimes.com. And, if you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts. This week’s show was produced by Kristin Schwab for Transmitter Media and edited by Sara Nics. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, Ian Prasad Philbrick, and Francis Ying. Our theme was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. We’ll see you back here next week. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ross douthat