Al Hunt and James Carville talk impeachment and respond to Elizabeth Warren's rejection of the "War Room" political strategy James made popular. Financial Times US national editor and author of The Retreat of Western Liberalism Ed Luce dissects the UK elections and the ramifications of Brexit on the world at large.
Al Hunt: 00:02 Hi, and welcome to our third edition of 2020 Politics War Room. I'm Al Hunt with my partner James Carville who is over in London. We have so much to talk about today. Impeachment. Christy Harvey is going to take on these two old white guys and we're going to talk about, in addition to impeachment, we're talking about the clash. The great political clash, Elizabeth Warren and James Carville. Elizabeth Warren's rejected James Carville's approach to politics.
But first we something even better. We have Ed Luce, who is the distinguished chief Washington correspondent and columnist for the Financial Times. Ed, once again you have elevated this program. I thank you.
Ed, your reach is global. You write about everything. You've been based overseas. You've covered Washington with great distinction. You have written about impeachment and Trump. But today we want to focus on the British election and Brexit because it's less than a month away. From my point of view the conservatives, the Tories, have screwed everything up in the last three years. First, David Cameron. Then May. and now Boris Johnson. But it looks like they're going to win a big victory December 12. Is that right? And, if so, why? How?
Ed Luce: 01:17 It looks like that, but a week's a long time in politics and there's still four of them. The last three times the pollsters have given us an indication of an outcome in Britain, the pollsters have been wrong. Namely, Theresa May called a general election in 2017 with the expectation she'd win big and she lost the majority and then ended up depending on the DUP, the Northern Irish party, for a majority. Before that the referendum, of course. Polls narrowly predicted a Remain victory in 2016. And then before that, in 2015, when Cameron had to go to the country after five years in government it predicted a hung parliament or a Labour victory, and actually the Conservatives won.
Al Hunt: 02:02 So it's too soon?
Ed Luce: 02:04 It's too soon. The British electorate are in an even more sort of restless, promiscuous political mood than they were in the last [inaudible 00:02:14].
Al Hunt: 02:13 We're going to get James in this in just a minute. But from afar, from across the pond, you look at Boris Johnson. You say, "This is Trump squared." I don't know that he believes in anything. He has been rejected by Parliament. So shy shouldn't this be a slam dunk for the opposition?
Ed Luce: 02:32 It's extraordinary ... For two reasons. One, Boris is playing this line of Brexit fatigue. Everybody is fed up with Brexit. They can't hear another word about it. It's only the fanatics on either side of Leave and Remain that have any appetite to even discuss this issue. And he's got people believing, quite falsely, I mean completely contrary to reality that if Britain leaves then we end the Brexit conversation. In reality what happens is it then begins. This isn't even the end of the beginning. Then you have years and years and years of negotiations on the details of Britain's future relationship with the European Union. But he's got people believing this. Brexit fatigue.
And the other reason is that Jeremy Corbyn is leader of the Labour party, and Jeremy Corbyn's personal approval ratings are deeply double digit negative. He is not trusted as a potential Prime Minister to the extent that Boris is seen as this sort of tall, strong, decisive, principled leader by comparison. Again, complete nonsense.
And both of these nostrums, A: we will end Brexit. Brexit fatigue will be satisfied by going out of Europe. And B: Corbyn is a minnow compared to the giant Johnson. Both give you real cause to wonder about the wisdom of crowd.
Al Hunt: 03:51 Yeah. Ed, think Edward R. Murrow in London. Think Walter Lippmann visiting the world's capitals and now James Carville in London. James, give the perspective from across the pond.
James Carville: 04:04 Well, this is my perspective. I'm going to get Ed to react to it. I find what's happening here utterly frightening when I think about the United States. I mean Boris Johnson strikes me as kind of a clownish guy almost. The Tory governments have been massively unsuccessful. They're screwed things up. Yet, as of now it looks as if you would have to rate them the favorites.
We have the [carbonization 00:04:32] of the Democratic Party in the United States, I fear we could end up in the same place. Do you have any reaction to that hypothesis, Ed?
Ed Luce: 04:40 Yeah. I agree with you. You've got a choice between terrible and extremely awful. The space for anybody within either party who is reasonable, attached to some degree of empirical reality is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. There is a sort of Gresham's law they call it, the bad driving out the good, working across the political spectrum in Britain. I see similar signs that you're alluding to here in the United States.
I think in both cases it's actually worse on the right than the left. But the left is beginning to show an appetite for catching up. It's further down the road in Britain. What's sort of also disturbing about this is Britain ... You know Britain might not be a huge world power anymore but there is an affinity between what happens in Britain and what happens in America. There just seems to be more than a coincidence of timing, the shift in public sentiment. 2016-
James Carville: 05:38 That's your Reagan-Blair-Clinton.
Ed Luce: 05:40 Exactly. And now populism. And if we're seeing a Boris reelection, a Conservative victory, the Conservatives in the process of being rewarded for spectacular failure. For spectacular failure. For malpractice and negligence on an epic scale in Britain. Then I fear that linkage with what might happen in 2020 in America.
James Carville: 06:06 You know that the entire Caucasian world, for lack of a better work for it, from Kyiv all the way to San Francisco. I mean if you look at Hungary, you look at what's happening in Poland, France. UK being prime example. The United States. It seems that there's great dissatisfaction among Western, Caucasian people. A lot it is coming from the right, but a lot of it comes from the left. It seems like we have a void of leadership, particularly in the UK and US right now. It used to be you'd mention them and there was linkage between different leaders. And boy, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump just doesn't have the ring of Churchill and Roosevelt. At least to me it doesn't.
Ed Luce: 06:58 Somebody was asking the other day which part of the Western world you could look to to find however small a country, down to Andorra or Liechtenstein, where you could actually find a leader worth admiring in today's Western democracies. I did after some struggle come up with one sort of half answer which is Leo Varadkar, the Taoiseach of Ireland, who has played a very good hand and where populism of left and right is very subdued. The Sinn Fein is Ireland's both left and right wing populist party, it's nationalist but it's also got Marxian economics, is nowhere to be seen electorally in Ireland.
I think one of the reasons for the fact that Ireland is happy. Ireland, the country once dominated by the Catholic Church, with a gay, half Indian Prime Minister who's Hindu. Quite happy with his performance. The populists nowhere to be seen. And a country that has seen mass immigration in the last 20 years, which of course we have too. Why is it that that dog isn't barking in Ireland? And I think there's a simple answer to that, which we've been lacking in America and we've been lacking in Britain, which is that the rising tide there is lifting all boats economically. That there is really strong, across the board, middle class income growth. And whilst that lasts the populist dog isn't barking in Ireland. But other than Ireland, very, very hard-
James Carville: 08:25 Is there an explanation? Why have wages gone in Ireland and not Britain, or why not in the US that much? Is there some policy or are they just lucky?
Ed Luce: 08:37 There's a little bit of sort of one-offedness about it. Namely that the Irish are pretty good at tax competition and so you've got most of the big tech companies have their European headquarters there. But that's a bit that can't be replicated. And I think post-Brexit the French might try and rein Ireland in exchange for having backed Ireland to the hilt over their Brexit negotiations. This model might be limited. But the Irish have done a pretty good job at the same time at investing in skills development and modernizing the country's infrastructure. The kinds of things that we could do in the United States and in Britain. So we should pay attention to that as well.
Al Hunt: 09:19 Ed, let's get back to the British election just for a second. 29 days. I mean you said it's not a foregone conclusion, the polls have been wrong in the past. You can't see Corbyn getting a majority in Parliament, can you?
Ed Luce: 09:32 It's pretty hard to see how that would happen. His best scenario was that Nigel Farage's Brexit party would run against the Tory conservatives in every constituency, and therefor split the Leave vote and allow Labour to win in many more seats than the polls indicate it would normally win in. But Farage has now said he's not going to contest, the Brexit Party is not going to contest any conservative held seat.
Al Hunt: 09:59 So what's the likely ... If you picked the non-Boris outcome, what's the most likely? What would it be? Would it be a coalition of what sort?
Ed Luce: 10:09 Well, it's very hard to imagine that because a coalition would need to involve the Liberal Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, led by Jo Swinson. And her whole thing is we're basically the Conservative Party for pro-Europeans. She's moderate, pro-business, centrist, center right. Of the hundred top constituencies they're targeting I think 94 of them are Conservative held. So any whiff of her being nice to or indicating she could make a deal with Jeremy Corbyn would be death to that strategy. The pro-European Tories would stay with the Tory Party rather than allow Jeremy Corbyn to become Prime Minister. So it's really hard to imagine a Lib-Lab coalition government with Corbyn as leader. It's very easy to imagine on if somebody like David Miliband were leader or a Tony Blair type figure were leader. But that's not where the Labour Party is, I'm afraid.
Al Hunt: 11:09 James, they sound as screwed up as we are.
James Carville: 11:12 I mean usually people in a party want to win and they're sticking with someone who basically has very little chance to win. What's his hold? Is it that the Labour Party has become so leftist, radicalized that they don't even care about winning anymore?
Ed Luce: 11:30 It's a really good question. The personal grip that Corbyn has over the party through this Momentum movement, which there's a lot of, I don't know, former Trotskyites. There's a lot of quite thuggish leftist thinkers involved in this movement. And there's a lot of intimidation at the grassroots of people who don't follow the leaders' line. I think it's quite hard to translate that into a rational Labour Party leadership policy because there's fear, and people are being threatened with being deselected, which is basically primaried, kicked out of the party. There've been expulsions. There's been old-style militant intimidation tactics going on around Corbyn's people. So the fact that he's got this image as a sort of vegetable plot tilling rather eccentric uncle, benign uncle, figure is completely belied by the tactics of the people around him, this Momentum movement.
James Carville: 12:34 There's a word that comes to mind that maybe Jeremy Corbyn might like, called Stalinist.
Ed Luce: 12:41 Yeah.
James Carville: 12:43 Sorry. I mean he operates in a democracy. He wants to. But it's intimidating people in your own party. What Mark Shields used to say, that a political party that is looking for heretics and not converts is a political party that's not going to win an election. It seems to be that the leftist movement in the United States and the Labour Party in Britain, anybody who doesn't agree with them is being excluded, which strikes me as not a very smart way to go about winning an election.
Ed Luce: 13:19 It's very dumb, and I like the heretic-convert sort of thing because that pretty much fits as a description of how he's running the party. He's so pure and in love with his own purity that any sense he could compromise, that he would behave in a less holy fashion, is just not broached in his company. I mean you saw this week with Evo Morales, the Bolivian leader, who tried to rig the election in Bolivia, standing down. This is the one foreign issue Jeremy Corbyn during an election campaign sees fit to comment on publicly by saying he was removed in a military coup, which is complete nonsense.
But Morales is in the sort of Cuban socialist, Venezuela, Chavez-ta mode that is Corbyn's ideological well. And that's the one issue in the general election on the foreign policy plane that he sees fit to comment on. That's remarkable.
Al Hunt: 14:19 It is. Let's assume for a moment ... I understand the polls can be wrong. It can change ... that Boris wins on December 12 and puts together whatever. Whether he has a majority, whatever coalition he puts together. What happens with Brexit? Does he take Britain out in January?
Ed Luce: 14:36 He takes Britain out in January on the basis of this deal that he negotiated a couple of weeks ago that is not that much different from the deal Theresa May negotiated. Then you have a new deadline which is the end of December of 2020 to complete the trade agreement. So that then becomes the next no-deal exit opportunity.
Al Hunt: 14:58 What are the economic implications from the people you talk to of that occurring?
Ed Luce: 15:04 They're not good. I mean Britain's already dropped from being amongst the highest growth rate in the G7 in 2016 to now the lowest, a little bit above Italy but second lowest maybe. But the real implications are on investment. Tesla just announced it cannot do its European headquarter in Britain because the uncertainty is too great. There are many Teslas that are thinking that we just can't predict anything.
James Carville: 15:30 So the Carville family is actually having it's family reunion at our ancestral home. There's a lot of Carvilles still there, in County Monaghan, which is right on the border with Armagh, bandit country. It was the center of The Troubles. If they pull out of the EU, when we go there ... I asked my cousins, "Are we in the Republic of Ireland or the UK?" There's no border now. Are they going to have to go back to having sentry points to cross back and forth?
Ed Luce: 16:06 Not under the deal that Johnson negotiated. The checks, the customs checks are in the Irish Sea rather than on the island of Ireland. So not under that bit of the deal. So to that extent Leo Varadkar has been very, very good. Europe, there's not been a crack. It's stuck with the Irish position which I believe is the correct position. That you cannot have those sentry posts back. So, for the time being, if the Boris deal holds, that at least is one silver lining to an otherwise spectacularly bad deal.
James Carville: 16:39 I'll take it because I think we're coming up here in like August of next year. It's already been set. I want to go a little bit different direction. As you know, Ed, I've told you many times, we're both big fans of Martin Wolf, who writes a weekly column for the Financial Times. Martin's column today was about the rise of China which is something that Al has been talking about for a long time because of the Graham Allison book.
But when you read Martin's column what you walk away with is we're losing valuable time under Trump. The Chinese are rolling ahead and we're not rolling sideways. We're kind of in reverse. I thought his column was very good but was kind of a wake-up call for the United States. How did you take that column?
Ed Luce: 17:32 Well, Martin I think has been very clear on the mishandling, Trump administration's mishandling, of China since day one. It's really important to pick up what a guy called Long Yongtu, the former Chinese chief negotiator, said last week in a conference in Hong Kong. He said that we want Trump to be reelected. He's the ideal negotiating opponent. He gives his strategy on Twitter. He was, by Chinese standards, immensely scathing of Donald Trump as a negotiating opponent. He said, "We would be very happy to see him reelected."
James Carville: 18:11 It was like at an investment conference. I'd love to know if that was intentional or if he was just kind of popping off and it got out. I don't know the answer to that but I saw the same thing, of course. Albert, you can address this. The myth that he is some kind of a great negotiator is one of the all-time myths about Trump I think.
Al Hunt: 18:31 Wait a minute. Didn't he end Obamacare? He negotiated that, right? No, he's a terrible negotiator, and I think you two are absolutely right. And, also, let's not forget the dominant power in the Middle East today is probably Russia thanks to Donald Trump. So it's just been dreadful all around the globe. Before we lose Ed, James, let me ... He is also a great expert on American politics. Give us your take and give us what you think the British take is ... such as is, I know it's different whether it's Johnson or others ... on Trump and impeachment.
Ed Luce: 19:06 I think like a lot of people the Brits are still confused about the different between impeachment and removal. So you have to keep reminding them that it's the equivalent of the indictment. Therefore when I or you or most of us will say, Look it's highly likely to happen, the guy's going to be impeached, and he will then be acquitted and he will then behave as if he's basically now immune to any force of gravity, that this will embolden him. In spite of the thing that it's the right thing for the Democrats to do and they ought to be doing it, it sort of I think puts us all in a rather frightened frame of mind. That Trump will think, I can do anything. They can impeach me. And it doesn't change a thing. I hope that Mitt Romney and others might rally a few Republicans to actually regain their spines. It still could happen, but on current trajectory this a rather frightening scenario.
Al Hunt: 20:09 It sure is. James, we're hitting above our weight.
James Carville: 20:13 I just love talking to him and when I get a chance to talk to him with you and let other people listen in I think it's really interesting. It's not exciting. To tell you the truth it's a little bit depressing. Unfortunately that's what the new is.
Al Hunt: 20:26 That's the world we live in.
James Carville: 20:27 Yeah.
Al Hunt: 20:28 Ed, I just want one commitment ... I agree with everything James says ... You'll come back.
Ed Luce: 20:32 I will definitely come back. I will try and gatecrash the Carville family reunion because that sounds like fun.
Al Hunt: 20:38 I think everybody ought to do that. Ed Luce, it's been terrific. Nice to have you here.
Ed Luce: 20:43 Delighted. Thank you.
Al Hunt: 20:50 There seems to be a great crash going on. Elizabeth Warren put out the word last week that she's rejecting the Carville approach to this campaign. What do you think?
James Carville: 21:01 Well, I understand it. This a phone call, [inaudible 00:21:07]. She had made this proposal, Medicare for All, and she also had her version of a funding mechanism for it and then just stopped talking about it. This is the largest policy proposal in modern American presidential history. I'm trying to think of something else. I don't think I can. This is 20% of the economy. Usually in my experience in politics if a campaign makes a major policy proposal, particularly one of this magnitude, that they want to talk about it. They want to defend it. They want it to be part of the conversation. They want to have cable shows around it. They want to have on-line debate or chat rooms or whatever the hell people do now.
It's like they just said, okay, we're going to do this and then we're going to act like we never said it, which to me is downright strange. As I pointed out, maybe there's something that I don't know. Maybe there's a new thing out there and maybe I'm stuck back in the '80s or the '90s and I don't understand something about American politics. But for the life of me, I just don't understand it. Not even remotely.
Al Hunt: 22:19 I agree with you. It's strange.
James Carville: 22:20 I mean it looks like that she wanted ... If I had to guess, it looks like somebody at a meeting said, "Let's not let Bernie get to the left of us because he'll suck up the oxygen so we'll just say this and act like it never happened." I don't know. But the one thing that I do know is the other side gets to talk, and people are going to talk about this a lot. I mean I was in Las Vegas, Albert. Think about this. Very, very critical state in the Democratic ... Nevada caucuses are very critical. One of the reasons that I love Las Vegas, I love Las Vegas, is I know that everybody that waits on me is making significantly more than the minimum wage. I know everyone from the bellman to the hotel maid to anybody else, I know they have health insurance, right? That makes me feel good as a tourist.
So you're going to go in there, the Culinary Union takes great pride. They're very [inaudible 00:23:21], thank you so much sir. Really powerful and I think a really good force in Nevada and particularly Las Vegas. So you've going to go to these Culinary Union members and tell them they're all our of their healthcare, that they've negotiated and bled for over the years, to be in Medicare? They're not going to like that. I don't think they're going to like that at all. And I don't think union people around the country ... Why are we taking them out of hard negotiated healthcare plans? We say, well, don't worry, over the extent of your life you'll save money.
I don't think that's going to work. At least there has to be an answer for it. What happens to the market cap of all of these companies that sell health insurance? Are they just going to be out of business one day? Or pension funds? Or widowers that invest in them, are they just going to lose all their money? I don't know the answers to these.
Al Hunt: 24:17 Well, to quote the fabled Joe Louis, let me warn Elizabeth Warren on this issue, "You can run but you cannot hide." At some point she's going to have to take this up. Listen this is a week, the other day-
James Carville: 24:32 Let me quote another boxer, Iron Mike, "Everybody got a plan till you hit them in the mouth."
Al Hunt: 24:38 Yeah, that's right. But on this week Washington is dominated by impeachment. A day or so ago the House Intelligence Committee began. James, this is a very clear-cut case. You can decide you don't think a president ought to be impeached and you can decide you don't think a president should be convicted. But he clearly engaged in a quid pro quo. It is absolutely undeniable, certifiable. They've lied about it. The Republicans have tried every possible explanation. My favorite, latest one is that Trump just wanted to root out corruption in the Ukraine because Trump is a great anti-corruption guy. That's kind of like saying Harvey Weinstein wanted to look at gender discrimination. I mean it's just clear cut.
James Carville: 25:23 Well, I think that I would frame it a little bit different than that.
Al Hunt: 25:27 You wouldn't do the Harvey Weinstein bit?
James Carville: 25:31 [crosstalk 00:25:31]. What he clearly did was he was trying to use the constitutionally granted powers to him for his own personal political gain. If you do that in a company you're fired on the spot. If I worked for a company ... You run the Wall Street Journal as you did, you were the bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, and you said, Hey, James, I want to get my kid into Tulane. And I said if you write a good column, I'll get your kid into Tulane. You're using your place for your own personal gain. You would be fired in a tenth of a second as you well should be if you ever did anything like that.
This is what he was doing. He actually was breaking the law because it was constitutionally appropriated under Congress. But he was trying to use his leverage and power that is granted to him by the people of the United States for his personal political gain. There can't be any higher crime than that. There's just not. If you think about it in terms of a constitutional question it's worse than shooting somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue. Because you're taking something that you were granted and using it for your own personal political gain. It's ridiculous. That's exactly what happened. There's not any doubt about what, no one doubts that that's what happened.
Al Hunt: 27:03 Well, if this isn't abuse of power then we're going to have to redefine the whole constitutional system. Because this is, as you say, as flagrant abuse as you can possibly imagine. The people who are testifying this week and next week, James, are not a bunch of left-wing anti-Trump Bernie Sanders loving, Volvo-driving people from Vermont. They are distinguished foreign service officers, ambassadors, military veterans who worked in this administration.
James Carville: 27:39 Right. Look, if you look at this set of facts and you're not repulsed, I mean really repulsed, then I'd like an explanation for it. The one explanation that I don't buy is everybody else does it. I've never known this to happen. I literally ... I had a debate with Karl. What the comeback was is Obama told-
Al Hunt: 28:09 Karl Rove.
James Carville: 28:09 Clinton that we'll negotiate after the election. You know, that's not the same. Lincoln pressured Sherman to take Atlanta before the election because he was about to lose. That's an entirely different thing.
Al Hunt: 28:24 Of course it is.
James Carville: 28:25 It's self-dealing. It doesn't even make any sense. Utterly there is not defense that I can see to the underlying charge, that he tried, he attempted ... I mean it's the Robert Wray, "Well, it didn't succeed." Well, the law doesn't give you credit for not succeeding. I guess if I shot you and missed that would be attempted murder. So if I hit you and you died. I can't get the electric chair for attempted murder but that's about it. It's absurd. I don't even understand their rationale.
Al Hunt: 29:04 Well, Robert Wray who is I guess the last of the so-called Clinton special prosecutors, wrote I thought an absurd piece in Time in which he said it didn't succeed. But you're right, that's totally irrelevant. If I hire a hit man, the hit man misses, it doesn't mean I'm innocent. But he also says well, there wasn't really a crime committed and Madison and Hamilton said it has to be a crime. There wasn't a criminal code in 1787, James, so it's kind of hard for them to define a crime back then. But that's why the Republican explanation keeps shifting. It was once, well, it wasn't a quid pro quo. Then it was, well, maybe it was but he was an anti-corruption guy. Then maybe, well, yeah, it was bad, shouldn't have done it but it's not impeachable.
James Carville: 29:51 You know, Phil Zelikow, and I apologize if I'm mispronouncing his name, but he was the Republican chief staff member on the 9/11 Commission. I don't think I've ever met him but I know people that know him and they really respect him. I mean he's a very good lawyer. He pointed it out that it's a clear violation of federal bribery statute. I mean he didn't mince any words. Pretty clean. He gave you all the elements that you had, the elements of proof of the federal bribery statute and this thing meets the test to the nth degree. And he is hardly a Democratic partisan, or any such thing as a left-winger.
Al Hunt: 30:36 And likewise Bill Cohen, who was Clinton's Defense Secretary, before that spent 22 years as a Republican member of Congress, and was the key person on the 1974 impeachment committee and knows the issues as well as anybody, said if this isn't an impeachable offense then we've redefined the whole sense of what is and the whole sense of a republican form of government. It's really big stakes. He may well not be convicted. That's the conventional wisdom. But for the House not to go through this now would be an abdication of responsibility and we'll see what happens.
James Carville: 31:18 They're going to go through with it.
Al Hunt: 31:19 They are.
James Carville: 31:19 I promise you that.
Al Hunt: 31:20 They are.
You know we're joined now by one of our favorite people who keeps us on the straight and narrow, I guess, the great Christy Harvey who we've both known for 25 years. She doesn't have anything to do now because the Washington Nationals are not longer playing, so she can taunt and tease us. Go ahead, Christy.
Christy Harvey: 31:49 It's certainly amazing how much free time you have when baseball is over.
Al Hunt: 31:52 Oh, wow.
Christy Harvey: 31:52 I feel like I've-
Al Hunt: 31:55 May I interrupt just for a second though.
Christy Harvey: 31:56 Do it.
Al Hunt: 31:57 There's one exception. And I'm going to take an extra 30 seconds. James, you can do quick victory dance if you want for Tuscaloosa last Saturday, for LSU-Alabama.
James Carville: 32:06 I'll tell you something. Right now Ole Miss is a classic trap game. Two weeks ago they played Auburn. They lost by six points at Auburn.
Al Hunt: 32:15 He's poor mouthing now.
James Carville: 32:16 This week, this past weekend, they played New Mexico State in Oxford. All right? We have a tussle in Tuscaloosa. We were up. We got beat up. Then we got to go back on the road and play.
Al Hunt: 32:28 We is LSU by the way, folks.
James Carville: 32:30 Yeah. If you listen to this show and you don't know who we is then you've got to go wee wee. And we're coming off of that. I mean I think we're a better team than them. Look what happened to Kentucky against Evansville last night. I mean anything can happen in sports.
Al Hunt: 32:45 A couple of nights ago.
James Carville: 32:46 And we're walking into I fear a trap. I think Coach Orgeron has figured that out and I'm sure they're going to stress that to the football players. But you don't have any time when you're in the SEC to go one game and another. And maybe Ole Miss is getting better. Who am I to say they're not?
Al Hunt: 33:02 Well, I like Ole Miss's chances if you can take away that LSU quarterback and that isn't going to happen. Christy, go ahead.
Christy Harvey: 33:08 Sorry, guys, I'm a sports monogamist. I am just all baseball all the time. That's kind of it, so I'll take your word on the football. But I do have a number for you guys today and that number is 70%. I, of course like many people, care in the abstract about climate change. You know, I worry about it sometimes, think about it. But then sometimes something comes along where it really hits home. And for me it was this piece in the Washington Post this week that said, because of warming seas off the coast of Japan it's devastating the salmon industry. And basically over the last 15 years 70% of the salmon in the seas off of Japan have disappeared.
So I started to think about how when climate change gets personal I get really invested. It's the salmon. It's the fact that there is no more, or less of a Maine lobster industry. It's becoming the Canadian lobster industry as the seas get too warm up there. Down in New Orleans we've seen the devastation of oyster production because of fresh water and climate change issues.
So you know it just is starting to get really personal. Al, how about you? Is there anything in this climate change argument that kind of gets your engine revving?
Al Hunt: 34:21 Well, I'm just going to spend 30 seconds because this is James Carville's issue. I mean he has been talking about this and fills it with such incredible passion and knowledge I really want him to expand on it. First, I guess on a lighter note, one of the implications is the Louisville slugger bat company says that with not as many trees they're not going to be able to produce bats. And if they deny me Juan Soto hitting 50 home runs in seven years I'll hate that.
On a much, much more serious note, I think the people who understand this danger have to be focused on it. And by focused, the Green New Deal I'm sure has a lot of good things but throws the kitchen sink in. If this is an existential threat then we ought to approach it as such and we ought to consider, really ought to consider nuclear power, carbon tax, and everything. Because it's that serious. But, again, James Carville, there's nobody who cares about this as much as James.
James Carville: 35:12 So, Christy, first of all it's Brett Anderson who wrote the story in the Times on the oysters, one of the best food critics in the country. He's won any number of awards. He lives in New Orleans. Now his dad was the governor of Minnesota.
Christy Harvey: 35:25 Really?
James Carville: 35:26 Yes. He came to my class last Tuesday in Baton Rouge. He's a terrific journalist and he understands climate as well as any journalist out there. So I'm going to take a little time here because this is really significant to me. I have been teaching this and trying to get young people really motivated by this. They'll give me the answer but we're missing something in this debate.
I called Sean Wilentz who was the chairman of the History Department at Princeton. I said, "Sean, what's a time in history when people acted against their perceived short term interests?" He said, "Try the British anti-slave trade movement." He recommended a book called Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild. He is the husband of Arlie Russell Hochschild who wrote the book about strangers in their own land, about the southwest Louisiana Trump people.
I was reading the book and something hit me. The problem with the climate movement is it is the only major social or political movement that uses no emotion. The British anti-slave trade had the greatest song in the history of the English language, Amazing Grace. They used Wedgwood china. They used diagrams. Somehow or another ... There's not a rainbow flag I can put in my window. There's not an anchor and globe lapel pin that I can wear that says I was in the Marine Corps. There's not a purple and gold cap that I could wear that says I'm an LSU fan. There's not a curly W to the whole god damn movement.
Until people understand that emotion is a central and necessary ingredient to bring people to action we're going to continue down this road. We need a god damn song. We need a piece of art. We need a bumper sticker. We need a lapel pin. Everybody has a song. If I show you a crucifix, a cross, a crescent, a star of David, you know exactly what it is. And there's no universal symbol for people that are just distraught about what's happening to the world. I think we're missing a big part of this. So somebody give me a god damn song.
Christy Harvey: 37:59 You know what? Somebody give James his god damn song. I think that all the listeners, the Politics War Roommates, come find us on Twitter at Politics War Room, or email us at politicswarroom@gmail.com. And send James his song.
James Carville: 38:16 Yeah, give me a piece of art.
Christy Harvey: 38:17 Art too.
James Carville: 38:19 I'll take anything.
Al Hunt: 38:20 We want to hear from you out there.
James Carville: 38:25 Emotion, good or bad. Think the way that evil uses emotion.
Christy Harvey: 38:25 Absolutely.
James Carville: 38:30 The swastikas. If I put a Confederate flag in the back of my pickup truck you know exactly what I'm telling you. I can communicate with you instantly.
Al Hunt: 38:39 Okay. We expect an outpouring this week. James's song. Christy, as always, thank you and we'll be with you next week.
James, we're going to close. We're going to do a final segment, real, real short. We're going to start off calling it Back Page and it's just going to be whatever really jumps into your mind. It can be something we love, something we hate, and do it real quickly.
I'll start. Mine subject is Nikki Haley who this week decided she was going to be a Trumpite forever. She said that John Kelly and Rex Tillerson were trying to undermine Donald Trump's foreign policy, which of course is a disaster and they were trying to save the country. And she refused to go along. I want to quote Michael Gerson, a conservative writer in the Washington Post, said that, "Haley ignored her conscience, betrayed her colleagues, and injured her country. She said that Donald Trump tells the truth. That means she does not."
James Carville: 39:45 I can't tell what Nikki Haley was thinking. Of course, I know what she was thinking. She's thinking that he's going to dump Pence and pick her as Vice President.
Al Hunt: 39:54 Yeah. That may happen. It's not impossible that that happens.
James Carville: 39:59 My thing is no so much of an outrage. It's a column in the New York Times by Timothy Egan, who I've read before, didn't read him religiously, I just kind of liked him about his sister in eastern Oregon who apparently has some issues, and works at the Walmart and is a die-hard Trump supporter because the Democrats and the urbanists in this party ... You've got an urban wing of the Democratic Party that dismisses everybody that is not part of the hip, the diverse, the you-name-it coalition. And these people hear it.
It's about how his sister thinks with some justification that major parts of the Democratic Party do not value rural people, in particular rural white people, saying we value urban people. That's a losing ... We're not trying to win elections here. We're trying to prove a point. We're trying to convince people that we're better than them. That's just a stupid point in politics. A really stupid point. I don't know Mr. Egan and I thought it was a well-written column and I think it made a point that should resonate out there all across the Democratic coalition.
Al Hunt: 41:19 On that, I agree. It was the New York Times last Saturday, Timothy Egan. And please write in. Send James his song, his poem.
James Carville: 41:27 I need my song.
Al Hunt: 41:28 His verse. Do it for James. Okay? Hey, thank you everybody. Thank you, James Carville over in London. And Ed Luce who was here, great guest.
James Carville: 41:38 I think Ed is probably our all-time greatest.
Al Hunt: 41:42 Well, he's up there with Christy Harvey.
James Carville: 41:44 Well, Christy is part of the family.
Al Hunt: 41:46 She's special.
James Carville: 41:46 She's not a guest.
Al Hunt: 41:46 Okay. All right. We'll be talking to you next week.
James Carville: 41:50 You bet.