#387 — Politics & Power
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.

There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Rahm Emanuel. Rahm is currently the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, where he is just wrapping up his term. He was also the 55th mayor of the city of Chicago, a position he held until 2019.

Before that, he was President Obama's Chief of Staff. He was also a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois. And prior to that, you might remember him as a key member of President Clinton's administration, ultimately serving as his senior advisor for policy and politics. I happened to be going to Japan and realized I could talk to Rahm in person at the embassy, and there was a lot to talk about. We generally discussed the state of the world and American politics.

We talk about his ambassadorship in Japan, the mystery of Japan's economic health, U.S. competition with China, possible conflict over Taiwan and the Philippines, the significance of the South China Sea, the history of the U.S.-Japan friendship. And then we turn to U.S. politics. We discuss how the Democratic Party lost its way, immigration, whether Vice President Harris needs a sister-soldier moment.

whether she should explain her changes of position better than she has. And then after we cover that fraught territory, we turn to the happy topic of the Middle East. We discuss the standing of Israel in the eyes of the world, anti-Semitism, the Abraham Accords, Hamas, settlements in the West Bank, the influence of the religious right in Israel, a possible war with Iran, Netanyahu and Israeli security, a two-state solution,

whether a Harris administration would reliably support Israel, and other topics. Anyway, the conversation was a lot of fun, and now I bring you Ambassador Rahm Emanuel. So I'm here with Ambassador Rahm Emanuel. Ambassador, thanks for joining me. Thanks for coming in on your vacation. It's kind of like a work release program. Exactly, yeah. For you.

We'll see if I can get through complete sentences here because I've been in the country for almost 48 hours. Oh, so you woke up at one in the morning? Yeah, exactly. Close. Yeah, I know that feeling. After four hours of sleep. Yeah, yeah. But it's great to meet you. Nice to meet you. We were thrown together by the incomparable Michael Kivas. Correct. And yeah, so we owe him the credit of this. Well, we'll see at the end of the show whether he gets points or demerits. Exactly, exactly.

So there's so much to talk about. I mean, I want to start with your current post here in Japan, but we're going to wander from the Pacific. We're going to play risk. We're just going to go across the map. Yeah, we're going to, because obviously you've touched, you have so many areas of expertise. So just to remind people, you have served in two presidential administrations. I'm counting this would be three, yeah. President.

President Clinton, senior advisor, President Obama's chief of staff, and then ambassador for President Biden, or for the United States. Forgive me, I didn't really think of an ambassadorship as... That's fair. No, you're right. Is it in the executive branch? No, it's State Department. You could say, but you're appointing... You know, there's two types of appointments I don't want to waste on it. There's a career appointment, and then there's political appointments. We're the only country that really has it. And in the political sphere, it breaks down donors...

or formerly elected officials. Senator Mansfield, majority leader, ambassador here. Former Vice President Walter Mondale, ambassador here. Former Speaker of the House Tom Foley, ambassador here. This has to be a coveted gig, right? On the list of countries where you can be an ambassador. Well, you haven't seen the House, but this will probably get me in trouble, but it will never be referred to as Section 8 public housing. But if you're going to live in public housing, that's the way to go. But the job is actually, on a serious note,

The job itself at this moment in time between the United States and Japan is like everything every other ambassador wanted. Japan's ready to break out, do things and do things from real energy and time, et cetera. And I think they've surprised themselves, if I could, about how much they've gotten done in a short period of time. We're in the middle of redesigning our entire Indo-Pacific strategy from a hub and spoke to this latticework. Because of my background and experience, I've been intimately involved in the trilateral with

Korea, Japan, and the United States, pushing that along. And then also the one with the United States, Japan, and Philippines. And so it has been from a work product, from kind of that intellectual energy that comes from really kind of putting your thumb on the scale. Totally fascinating. From a quality of life, it's a culture and experience that I feel like it's a gift to be part of something I never really knew. And then on a personal level, there's things about the society I find

Now, again, we're outside of it for a lot of people. Sometimes inside they feel oppressive. So you could feel that about our society on certain things. But, you know, as a former mayor that a city of Chicago that created safe passage routes for kids to walk to school, my staff always tired of hearing that. They accomplished that in Tokyo. What I can tell. You have a five-year-old walk to eight, nine blocks of school, just put their hand up, cars come to a stop. The respect for life. I mean, you then realize how much

We have stolen children's childhood from them in America. So from a lot of levels, I find this to be professionally rewarding and personally a gift. And I told the president that I want to thank him for giving me the opportunity to experience a whole new culture.

All right, so there are two mysteries that confront the novice in Japan. Neither one of us would refer to ourselves as novice. That's my first time here. I'm fresh off the plane. So from what I can tell, there has been an impressive amount of

economic stagnation here in almost a lost generation. If you're looking at the stock market index, I think if you had put a dollar in the Nikkei in 1989, you'd have exactly a dollar today or something close to that. Depends what the yen's trades at moment, but yes. Let me just complete this thought because it's not as invidious as it sounds. And yet,

It's obviously an incredibly prosperous society, right? It's just impeccable on so many levels, and it's not showing, at least from what I can tell, the signs of economic dysfunction that you would expect if you just looked at that graph. So can you- Yeah, one of the things I've read a little, and I'm very persuaded, I don't think the analysis, oh, the lost decades is really-

It's a top line. So if you lift the hood, if you go to the manufacturing side of the economy, from a productivity measurement, et cetera, it's incredibly productive. Why? Japan got a head start on the decline in population, so they're leaders in robotics and automation.

The top four robotic companies in the world, two of them are Japanese. Of the top seven, depending on how you want to count it, or eight automation companies, almost half are Japanese. So from the manufacturing side, which is a bigger piece of their economy than for the United States,

quite productive and stayed at world-class standards. Now on the service side, your description is accurate. The cloud is just coming here as a kind of a metaphor for a bigger kind of stagnation in the service side and technology adoption, et cetera. But the economy is a very export oriented and it's highly world-class economy.

They have a lot of strengths in my view. I mean, you have a highly educated workforce. They stay to the office till 10 or 11 o'clock at night. We can't get people in America at 10 or 11 in the morning into the office. Great universities, highly safe and secure, modern infrastructure system. You can get anywhere in the Indo-Pacific daily, multiple times. So there's a lot of advantages to that part of the economy. And

in the areas, I'll give you like take semiconductors space. It gets a lot of notoriety.

I could refer to Japan as the supply chain of the supply chain. So there's about 18 companies that are dominant in the materials and packaging, which is so essential, that have anywhere from 40% to 70% of worldwide share market in their space. And when you think of the people that make machines for the semiconductor, there's ASML in the Netherlands, Tokyo Electron here.

And so they have a, they have a lot that is a specialty, but I, you could get overwhelmed and biased from the writing. And I'm not sure it's a hundred percent accurate. And then it skews the way you interpret stuff. And it's,

in kind of early stage velocity now back. There's a much higher debt than we're carrying in the US, right? Isn't it like- Much higher than anybody else. I mean, there's like 200 plus percent. On the other hand, they do have that we don't have $22 trillion, dollars not yet, in savings. So while their debt is extremely high from a GDP standpoint,

Their savings is off the chart. Now, that's the good news. The bad news, it's earning up until this point, zero interest rate. And it's sitting as our grandparents would do in the mattress. There was no 401k, no savings type of, no allocation of capital. I sound like I was listening to Larry Summers when I was at the White House. But the use of capital is not the most efficient.

So from your perch here, how are you viewing our growing competition with China? That's an open-ended question. Increasingly bellicose noises coming from the other side of the Pacific. You know, here's what I would, I think we have to have a more, I wouldn't say nuanced view, but, and this is one of the things I've enjoyed working on in the sense of the trilats and some of this stuff.

China made a major mistake in this region. Go back 10 years with Wolf Warrior and maritime or other type of aggression to every country. You saw it just the other day with the Vietnam on their fishing. You see it in the Philippines. You see it on the border with India. You see it strafing Australian planes. You see what they've done to Japan in the last couple of weeks in terms of territorial, both aerial, naval, surface ship. It wouldn't call it aggression, but kind of violation.

That has made our job of organizing much easier. They try to isolate a country like the Philippines like doing now. And we have been able to, through our latticework system that President Biden has really put together, to take China as a strategy of isolating a country and make it the isolated party. And so on a political side and a security side,

I think we're in a better position than we were before. And I think China knows, which is why they always complain they're being contained or we're trying to contain them. They do a pretty good job of containing themselves because everybody in the region right now is trying to figure out how to make sure that the United States is anchored here as a counterweight against China. That's a big advantage for us. Where I think we are a beat behind the music, I think we're doing a great job, if I may say, on the diplomatic side, a really good job in up

updating on our security alliances and bringing, like given what Japan's doing, the ROK is doing, India's doing, others, a lot. I think China is making the same mistakes with their economic coercion, their mercantilism, their debt trap diplomacy. And we are just in the early stages of

of responding to that in the way that it took us about four years ago to figure out how to use their tactics against them, their own tactics against them. And China is, and I would say this,

We made a mistake as a country, all of us. We're all responsible for it. We called them a strategic competitor, believed what we were saying. China, when Xi comes in, decides the United States is a strategic adversary on their back heels because of the financial and banking problems. And we held on to this concept they were a competitor. They adopted a policy that we were an adversary, and we just caught on to who they are and what they're doing.

And so we lost a decade. That said, they also are in the beginning stages of losing a decade. But we have to make the most of that time and move with due speed and smart, not just urgency.

What do you think, we're going to get to U.S. politics, but what do you think the implications are of the U.S. election for our future with China? Well, it depends, first of all, what happens in the election. The gap in your question is that. That branch point, yeah. Well, here's what I think. Down each of those paths, what does China look like? I'm kind of biased, but let me say this. This is a crude way to say it. The Indo-Pacific is an away game for us. It's a home game for China. And if you think you're going to be relevant

in dealing with China, either on the security angle, the political angle, the diplomatic angle, the economic angle, you need allies and you need allies to trust you. And so if you are not good with your allies, then you got a problem here because you can't do anything in the region without a Japan, without a Republic of Korea, without an Australia, without a New Zealand, without a Singapore, without an India, without the Philippines. So I got to be careful there so I don't get outside the hatch act of US being partisan.

I think it's pretty clear one candidate's really strong about alliances and allies, believes in them. It's very pertinent to this part of the world. You cannot operate that way without allies. And if you don't give allies trust and confidence, they'll do the bare minimum. And let me try, if I could illustrate one point. You know, for 30 or 40 years, presidents have tried to bring China, or rather Japan and Korea on the same page with us.

And for a lot of historical reasons, we all have, we have a complicated history of Japan. Japan has a complicated history of Korea. We actually also have a complicated history of Korea. That said, given where they were, given where their countries were, given their trust in the United States and specifically trust with the administration,

Both President Yun and Prime Minister Kishida went beyond just clearing the bar. They went farther. And the end result was probably one of the bigger, bolder moves we made in the region diplomatically the last 20, 30 years. China notices that. Now, if you don't work with your allies and give them confidence, they're not going to take the step. Take a look at President Merkel's right now.

Unlike Duarte, he is taking a step of trust with the United States. You don't treat an ally with that kind of respect. Something that's really, really important to the United States.

can slip through our fingers. So I think our election, and again, I gotta be careful. - Remind me of the implications of that Hatch Act. Just how tongue-tied will you be? - Well, I become a roommate for you. The cost of it is I lose a job and then I become your roommate, and that's really kind of not good for you. No, you can't violate, and there's some attorney at the State Department's like, I don't know, ghosting me everywhere on this thing. So I'm not allowed to be partisan.

So I will analyze it. So if you ask me about what it means here, you have to really believe in alliances.

if you want to be a counterweight to China. If you don't and you want to basically say, well, we're might equals right, and that's China's right, and that's their backyard, that's a different stake. I think you will find our allies taking a different strategy to the United States after that. Let me say this, the Hatch Act applies to US politics. Sometimes people don't think it applies to, I'm joking, my involvement in Japan. Right, right, right.

So what about Taiwan? Is this something perhaps you can't comment on it with full transparency? But what do you understand our policy with respect to Taiwan to be? What would we do? If it's a very clear ambiguity. So strategic ambiguity is our official policy? Well, yeah, it was established when Kissinger and Nixon came up with the one China policy. So look, there's three flashpoints right now.

the south china sea with philippines there's a taiwan straits and taiwan and then there's a 38th parallel with north korea and south korea and so not in a not wrong to ask about taiwan but everything you're thinking about taiwan is playing not just taiwan but in real time we're playing something's playing out right now in in the south china sea with the philippines and china

And I always remind, you know, you have a sovereign nation, Philippines. The international court in 2016, China versus Philippines ruled in favor of the Philippines. China has summarily dismissed it, not even listened to it. And they are a treaty ally of the United States. So while a lot of people, you know, rush right to Taiwan,

My view is, I don't know why you're passing up what's going on with the Philippines, because this is everything we're talking about. And whether the islands, the fishing rights, et cetera, and the international court rules established by the court, interpreted by the court, matters in whether a small country has standing against a more powerful country. Is it your understanding that we have the same policy with respect to the Philippines as Taiwan? No, in fact, we have a stronger policy because they're a treaty ally.

Taiwan is not a treaty ally. Are we treaty bound to come to their defense? Yeah. I mean, if something was to happen, and Senate President Marcos has indicated this and said something, that he would consider this as something that would happen to the Philippines from a security standpoint or their military, could trigger that alliance and that commitment in the word of the United States. Now, I try to remind people,

the south china sea that you know vietnam philippines malaysia all kind of uh counter other countries too 14 of the world's entire fish stock and catch is in that water massive amount of undiscovered oil and natural gas reserves there china is in confrontation just the other day there was a story they their coast guard

They went after the Vietnamese fishing boats, said that those are their islands, and it's very clear they're Vietnamese islands. They're doing it with the Philippines, et cetera. Now, we don't have a treaty ally with, Vietnam's not a treaty ally. Philippines is a treaty ally. We have a commitment to their, not only their sovereignty, but their military safety.

Is that multilateral? Does the UK have the same commitment with the Philippines? No. No? No. Yes, based on history. So you mentioned the complicated history between Japan and the US and Japan and Korea, et cetera. That's actually the second mystery I wanted to ask you about. So for anyone who even has a passing understanding of what happened during World War II in the Pacific, it seems frankly miraculous that

We found in Japan a friend of such durable goodwill as has persisted for the last 60-some-odd years. I don't know when the friendship started, if you can place it on the calendar, but it had to be at the latest 1960 or so, right? When did things completely thaw? Well, I do think it's a testament how the bitterest of foes can become the best of friends.

Yeah, I mean, it offers some hope for the world, one would hope, but it does seem, frankly, miraculous when you try to map it onto other conflicts that we're going to talk about. When I listen to the Japanese, they have a change. There is, and you read history, this is my reading of it, so other people say he doesn't know what he's talking about.

There's no doubt, and it's over in our, the residence for the ambassador is where General MacArthur receives the emperor. Now, our big moment at the end of the war, end, is the signing on the Missouri. That's our moment. That's our kind of trigger point. The meeting with the emperor and the acceptance of the emperor will stay as the emperor is a trigger point for the Japanese as I read history, as I witness history, as I witness others talk about it.

and the way the emperor then talks about the United States. And that is the first step on a journey to a different place from enemies during war to building friends.

The second piece is, I think it's really, really, nobody ever told me about this, and maybe I'm guilty of not talking to the right people or whatever. I think I talked to a lot of people when I was, what I call in the Senate, COVID quarantine, before you get confirmed. So we all know George Kennan's long memo about the Soviet Union containment, et cetera. Marshall sends Kennan here afterwards. I mean, this is later in his career, early in...

late 40s, and he writes an equally valuable memo

about the role Japan will play as an anchor, in this post-49, to communist China, and an anchor for the United States in the Pacific, Indo-Pacific. It wasn't called Indo then, but the Pacific, or in Southeast Asia. And it's, I happen to see it just once referenced in a book, so I pulled it up. It's unbelievably prescient. Now, so you can date 62 and the military alliance, et cetera,

But I would literally, if you ask me, okay, what was the first step on that journey to a different place? The receiving the emperor, us embracing the role of the emperor, which allowed Japan to move on. It's pretty also clear in the days of both Hiroshi of Nagasaki, we were more explicit where Secretary of State Burns is not, which is what Stimson was arguing for, that the emperor would stay.

The war may have ended sooner. Judgment, it's a judgment call. It's an interpretation. So that to me is, and it would give you hope. And I'll tell you the other thing. And I say this about the president Biden, when he held the ROK and the Japanese prime minister and the ROK president in Camp David. It's pretty ugly in Ukraine, pretty ugly in the Middle East, a lot of conflict in the world, Sudan. And you look at the rest of the certain battles in Africa. Yeah.

There was a place in Camp David where it shows what diplomacy and dialogue can achieve versus, I'm not saying that sometimes conflicts don't have their own logic, but I thought that was a hopeful sign in a pretty dark time that we're living in.

Yeah, as I say, it would be wonderful if there were a deep analogy between what we accomplished here, given just how horrific World War II was and the current crises you've mentioned. We're going to get to the Middle East and Iran because that's certainly top of mind. But we're going to go through U.S. politics and see what the Hatch Act can allow us to talk about.

I am a former ballet dancer. I'm pretty flexible. We'll see. You have a deep knowledge of democratic politics, obviously, and also you were mayor of Chicago, which gave you a special view of the local implications of certain policies. So I'm a lifelong Democrat. I've never voted Republican. I don't think I've been tempted to vote Republican, but I have

often thought in the last few years, certainly since what appeared to be a kind of social justice moral panic that took over the Democratic Party in around 2020.

that I would campaign for Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney at this point. Just give me a normal Republican and I could get behind that person. And if you know my history in castigating the theocrats on the Republican side, you would know just how far a pendulum swing that is. But it's in response to a sense that the Democratic Party has really lost its way. It may be recovering its way, certainly it seems to be.

executing a kind of pivot, however, unacknowledged in the campaign of Vice President Harris at the moment. But we're talking about a party which seemed for years at a stretch, again, I would date this to the 2020 campaign,

to be, I mean, pick your ghastly policy, defund the police. People should have their reputations destroyed for doubting whether they're more than two sexes biologically. I mean, there was an activist takeover of the conversation that I think has done great harm to our politics, if for no other reason than it has given real motive force to

cult that has subsumed the Republican Party. And there are many single-issue voters now who are not... I don't mean to... I'm giving you a lot. I'm good. Feel free to respond. Which of the 42 questions do you want me to answer first? I'll sharpen it up. Respond to the claim that the

the Democrats lost their minds for a few years there on issues like immigration and crime and what is politically necessary now in the final stages of this campaign. Okay. So, well, that's this campaign, but it's that, that question is about a bigger than just this election. Yeah. Okay. So let me try to unpack a couple of things that there's a lot in there. Um,

Not one that ever believed in or supported defund the police. And even when those who advocated said, well, it doesn't mean what it says. Well, then my attitude was, well, no, don't say it. Because if it doesn't mean what it says, you're confusing a lot of people. But you have to back up as a mayor that also had to work with and should have worked with the management of the police department. We had a lot of every Chicago, New York, LA, every city of any size had safeguards in. The truth is they atrophied.

And the police departments needed to be better managed from the responsibilities they had to both serve and protect. It's just a fact. And as a mayor, you're accountable for that. But the police department's oversights, while you had checks in the system, they really weren't working. And we had a confidence in them when they weren't working. But when you put into the mosaic of what you're talking about, not just on the policing side,

I don't think the Democratic Party could endorse today, or I think it could now, but in the period of time you were talking about, what Senator Kennedy and Senator John McCain negotiated.

And that was only 10 years ago from an immigration policy. President Clinton had advocated, which is my kind of North Star about this, that we're both a country of immigrants and a country of laws, and both have to be respected. I actually think the American people are more welcoming about immigrants, but they don't like their laws being broken, and they don't like a sense of out of control or somebody cheating a system into something else. So they're actually, when you look at communities around the country,

actually quite receptive to immigrants. It's a sense that the law is not being a by-to-by. And we went as, I don't want to say we, there were big voice, loud voices. Now, those voices didn't mean that they were loud. It doesn't mean they represented a lot of people. So as I have a rule in politics, sound is not always fury. Don't ever confuse sound with fury. Sometimes sound is fury, but sometimes it's just sound. So they were loud voices.

But the fact is, those voices did not, like people that would talk about Latinx or et cetera, weren't representing where the country was or even where the communities are. And give you one example. We haven't had an election yet. I think as a son and a grandson of an immigrant, I can say this, not the ambassador, but as a son and a grandson of immigrant, and I consider myself a child of an immigrant father. Obviously, President Trump's rhetoric about immigrants is really harsh and ugly, yet

He's doing better among Hispanics than almost anybody since George Bush 43. So it tells you the voices that thought they were representing the immigrant community didn't really know where the immigrant community, quote unquote, was. And it's pretty clear that even in the Hispanic community, there's not a respect for just crossing the border and being an undocumented, or if you want to use the term illegal or not use illegal, use undocumented. Pretty clear there's a respect also for the law.

and for the law being followed. And I thought our party, and voices in our party rather, were too much about a permissive culture and not much about a value-based culture. And that has caught up with us, straight up. And if you look at working class, because it's not just white, that's 2016 Trump. You look at 2024 Trump,

It's not working class whites. It's working class. There's an economic piece to this, but it's much more cultural. And our party, when you look at the success of Roosevelt, you look at the success of Kennedy, you look at the success of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, not to draw others out, or you could also put Jimmy Carter in there. It was...

The whole package, not just the economics, but also the sense of a value system. Remember, the most famous line or one of the most famous lines for Bill Clinton is 92 acceptance speech at the convention in New York was to the families and the parents that work hard, play by the rules, pay the taxes, raise your kids to know right from wrong, I'm going to be your president. That is a value statement.

That is not, I mean, he had his middle class tax cut, et cetera. But in the same sense that when President Obama appealed to a sense of hope and that there were blue, there were individuals in red, there is no blue or red America. There are only Americans of many different stripes and colors. There was a value there. And I think our party...

loses its way when it doesn't actually understand the cultural component. I believe firmly people are more and vote more than the totality of their wallet. Their wallet's a big piece. The safety of their kids is a big piece. The neighborhood school is a big piece. The things that happen in their community is a big piece. And we diminish that

And it's ironic because the times we have succeeded and created not just in one election, but a lasting legacy is when we respect the, what are termed cultural and societal issues. And we hurt ourselves when we veer off of that. So do you think the pendulum is swinging back? Yes. And very quickly, you can see it in not only manifested in elections, you can see it very quickly also within the, within the party.

- Yeah. - So the question is-- - And I don't know if you think those, let me, I'm cutting you off, I apologize, but you are talking to an Emmanuel, that's a habit of ours. I don't think that those voices ever really represented the Democratic Party. They intimidated a lot of people in the Democratic Party.

shut them down. - Well, but by numbers they didn't. The polling, only polling, or the only research I know of on this point suggests that it was 8% of activists or 8% of the party, but they captured the institutions, right? It became the new orthodoxy. - Well, what they- - They captured the New York Times, they captured Harvard, they captured medical journals. - No, but what they, they, well, whether you want to say, you're saying captured, I say they silenced a lot of other, intimidated a lot of other folks.

Either way, they have done, but they didn't, that's why I always say about politics, sound is not always fury. They did not represent, they never even got close to a majority. They never even got close to 10%.

And yet there are... Okay, but just a sanity check here. So I believe this is true. As the words tumble out of my mouth, I can't believe they're real, but I have this fact checked, at least by CNN, that when asked, I believe by the ACLU at some point in 2020, Vice President Harris said that she was in favor of offering gender reassignment surgery at taxpayer expense to incarcerated illegal immigrants. Okay.

Right. She checked that box, call it whatever you want. That most of America perceives that as just sheer lunacy, if not morally abhorrent. And that's right in a top of, let me just take this one issue. And I realized this is, this is plutonium that I've brought into your, your embassy. Don't worry. I have police for that. Yeah. It's you have some number of people left of center in our, in our

And they certainly seem to be a majority from the point of view of the New York times and the establishment where that you would begin to castigate anyone who would use the term woman in, in a context that could seem to be. I'm not going to sit here and not say I'm not. Something happened. You're admitting that something happened. No, no. There's something rationality got snapped for a second. I also happen to think it's snapped back, but that said, and,

And I'm not saying that either whether it was the New York Times or other institutions lost their center of gravity and their balance.

don't disagree with you. But I also think that you can't, well, look, you said you've only voted, I grew up in a home of, my grandfather was a socialist, became a Democrat because of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I mean, I think a Democrat was one of the 10 lost tribes for the Jewish people. So that's what I grew up in. I'm not, I will never vote for a Republican, can't vote, but now I just crossed the hatchet. So, okay, there goes that. The police are on their way. Yeah, but here's what I do want to say is,

you know, we're spending time because, and legitimately, care from a center slash progressive set of politics because it matters. But you actually would, if you would ask me what is amiss, and I got to watch myself here, and I'm not doing a good job self-policing as a second ago showed, what has happened over the last 10, 15 years of the Republican Party and the voices there

For all you want to say about some things in the Democratic Party, I think it's important to remember the Democratic Party center has held. I'm not saying that we've had bad moments of where the shrill has silenced people or intimidated people or the claim for orthodoxy hasn't. On the other hand, you said you would vote for Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney. They have no home.

You still have a home in the Democratic Party. I still have a home in the Democratic Party. And that's a difference where they don't. Jeff Flake, who's a good friend, we served together in Congress, was ambassador to Turkey. He just endorsed again, second time around. He endorsed President Biden last time, this time he did Kamala Harris. Because there isn't a home.

That's just not true in the Democratic Party. So it's very different. And again, I got to be careful. I probably twice have gone off sides and the ref is going to call to blow the whistle and give me a yellow flag here. But again, so I find your optimism here. I'm not, I'm not, I'm a hardened pal.

If the pendulum has swung back, if- I think it's swinging back. It's swinging back. So just take this narrow case that I just gave you. Does Vice President Harris, candidate Harris, need to acknowledge the change of opinion or just-

Well, no, it's just, it's going unremarked. I mean, she's, she's acting like someone who never thought this. Should she say, listen, our party went a little crazy in 2020, right? And I got caught up in this, right? Now put your, put your political hat on if you can and acknowledge that she's trailing three or four things of that sort that have a kind of, you know, you can't unring this crazy bell that rang in 2020. And that was one of them. There there's, there's,

There's one with, I don't think defund the police can be hung around her neck, but there's a couple of other. You can't hang that around her neck. When you look at her record as both a district attorney and attorney general, no way you could do that. And it's not an accident that while she, coming out of the box as the candidate for president, she leaned on that voice and that experience.

But she wanted to be a national. She has something around not making it a crime to come to the country illegally. There's a reboot in her brain, clearly, around issues of immigration, if not crime, socially polarizing issues like the transgender debate. So I'll just give you the perception from the center and the center-right is

She's carefully avoiding any conversation that would provoke questions on these kinds of topics. And she's just hoping to get into the end zone in November without ever having to address this change of heart.

I worry that, again, I worry as someone who desperately wants to see her be the next president, I worry that there's enough of the country who thinks she is a stealth candidate who will implement all of these crazy woke policies if she only gets the chance because she hasn't acknowledged just how clearly the spell has broken for her. Well, no. Again, I want to. Let me ask you, I'll give you one more way to sharpen it up.

shouldn't she have a sister soldier moment of some kind on these issues politically? Yeah, but see, that's not what you were earlier asking. That is what I mean to ask you. I want to be clear. You were saying she has to deal with herself and say something about where she, Kamala Harris and stuff.

That I would say no. So if she had a sister soldier moment on one of these topics, someone's going to say, well, wait a minute, you said in 2020 X, now you're saying Y, and she's going to have to have the conversation. Let me make a general rule. Let me give you a general assessment without making it about Kamala Harris. Two rules I've had about presidential politics and campaigns. To be a contender that wins, you have to project strength, confidence, and optimism. And

In a public mind's eye, they got to see you as being able to fill the space of that office. That's essential. More importantly for the president than for a senator or congressman, a little less for a governor and then a little less for mayor. But if you're a chief executive, and I may be biased because I'm from Chicago, you can't be smaller than the office. That's a big office and they want a big person for it.

If you go back through presidential history, at least in the take World War II forward, the candidate that has projected the strength, the confidence, and the optimism has won. Whether it's you, you're using shorthand. I happen to know what you mean by a sister soldier moment. But be able to be seen as strong enough to stand up and call a friend wrong when they're wrong is what you're looking at.

as a tactic to achieve that kind of larger purpose that may or may not be right. Again, I'm sitting 8,000 miles away, 14 hours away, but I do know what you have to, what in 2008 and in 1992, at least those are my experiences, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama's first election. They, in a comparative basis against both Bush 41, John McCain,

They won that fight, strength, confidence, and optimism, and big enough, ready enough for the office. - Well, remind me, I don't know if it had political implications, but did President Obama ever explain his change of heart around gay marriage? Did he ever have the interview? - Now remember, he's president then, not presidential candidate. - Right, so, but running for a second term, did it come up? - I mean, his biggest thing in '08 was his change of heart and running for president. He had to explain that, and he changed his view.

And I think, you know, you've got to, as one of the things, look, I mean, you and I are doing this interview.

I think 36 hours after the debate, I thought one of the better moments was when, I mean, I call him Tim. The vice president of the United States, Tim Walz, I happened to recruit him. You know, when he said, hey, that was a knucklehead move. He just handled it. And people can relate to him and relate to that. He just said it's a knucklehead move. And that was it. And you got to be, you know, when you've done something wrong, you say it. You're saying change of heart and say, look, with more information, I can do it.

I got it. But your questions, if I may, you're doing the podcast, so you can ask whatever you want, is so much where she has to come clean about something. And my view is that's not what I would do. And again, I got to be careful here. Yeah, no. My fear is that half the country- Can we play this on November 2nd? At 3 a.m.? Yeah, yeah.

But to take a peculiar example, but nonetheless an influential one. We're spending a lot of time here. I'm kind of wishing we'd go to the Middle East real quick. Yeah. Something cheerful. Let's go to something easy. Easy and cheerful. But you take a peculiar person like Elon Musk, right? Who's a blowhard to rival all blowhards at this moment. But he has a megaphone that 200 million people are listening to. Honestly, he...

he's a single issue voter on this kind of topic, right? I mean, like he got radicalized on some of these cultural war issues and he is treating her like a stealth far left democratic activist, right? And he's effectively doing that to an audience of some tens of millions of people who, if they're not persuadable, they're not persuadable. But what I'm imagining is that there are

some, whoever the undecided voters are out there. Here's what you're saying, and if I may, which is, I think, a challenge for the party and not just for her. We've allowed a few shrill voices in our party to become a caricature of our party. And they are first shrill. B, they don't represent anything but themselves. And C, we've allowed them, because we haven't used our own voice,

to become a caricature as if that's our opinion. So if those sentences came out of her mouth, what would be wrong with that? If you were running the campaign. I'm not running the campaign. Okay, I've got to be really clear. But to me, to me, those are the perfect sentences. I just want, I want them coming out of her mouth. I know what you want, but I keep trying to steer you. It's not about her saying what,

I understand what you're saying. And for my money, and again, I'm at a distance, it's being able, you said Sister Soulja, what I think is, look, you got to be able when one of your own friends or fellow travelers is wrong, call them out. And when you disagree, have the confidence, whether that's her or any candidate.

Now, yours, the sister soldier moment, having been part of the '92 campaign for President Clinton, it was a, even his end welfare as we know it, or putting 100,000 cops, or his immigration policy, were a nation of laws and a nation of... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast.

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