John Podhoretz (2:03)

It was so much harder.

Seth Mandel (2:04)

Isn't it, like, not even out of. I'm saying, isn't it not even out of 1600 anymore or something?

Eliana Johnson (2:09)

I thought they reverted for. For a time.

Seth Mandel (2:11)

It was like, there were 24, 20.

Eliana Johnson (2:14)

Yeah. Now it's back. Right?

John Podhoretz (2:16)

Okay, now I just want to say I'm bringing this up only to say that I myself did okay on the SATs. Not great. That's all I'm saying. And my thing was that I thought that the SATs, these were trick questions. And so I was always over. I overthought the answers because I was like, it can't be B, because that's too easy. And as I. As I learned subsequently from one of the people who helped, like, tutor one of my kids. This is a personality driven quirk that they have to drum out of kids. Like, their kids were like, don't think this. And they therefore have a natural advantage because, in fact, the SAT is not written to trick you. Like it's written for you to try to get one out of four or five multiple choice possibilities. But if you're the sort of person who's like, ah, ah, you know, they're trying to see if I'm, if I'm onto them. So I'm just saying I didn't do that great on the SATs. So I can therefore, I think, grasp with, grapple with the Gavin Newsom self plaint effort to reach out to his audience in Atlanta as he is beginning his book tour, talking about his dyslexia and how he got a 960 on his SATs. I did better than that, by the way. I just want to say, not that I want to take a lot of credit for this, but the SAT is a landmine for any politician to talk about because when it turned out, for example, famously in the year 2000, that George W. Bush, who was then thought by the entire liberal intelligentsia to be an illiterate idiot, had done better on his SATs than Al Gore and then had done better on his SATs than John Kerry. You know, this, this, this was a great hardship, heartbreaking moment for Joan Walsh of Salon. I think this was the 2004 thing when she discovered that not only had he had Bush done better than Kerry on his SATs, but he had done better than she, Joan Walsh had done on her SATs. And this was a world, this, this, this broker world in half. So politicians should generally stay away from the. Well, that guy. It's not a good thing to raise. And Gavin Newsom raised it in Atlanta. And Abe, Abe, you wrote a newsletter yesterday in which you described yourself as the. Having the interesting experience of being embarrassed for yourself even though another person did something. Shamed.

Abe Greenwald (5:01)

Yeah.

John Podhoretz (5:02)

But another person did something you didn't do. But that the event was so overwhelmingly shameful as a sort of social marker that it shamed you even to be alive. Can you please. Because we now need to explain what Newsom did and why it was so.

Abe Greenwald (5:18)

Yeah, so we should say Newsom was in Atlanta and he was on stage talking to the Atlanta mayor. Andre Dickens happens to be black. The audience, from the best I could tell, is all mixed. You know, it's, it's assorted there.

John Podhoretz (5:38)

Mixed.

Abe Greenwald (5:38)

It's mixed.

John Podhoretz (5:39)

Yeah, it's, it's integrated, as we used to say.

Abe Greenwald (5:42)

Yeah, right.

John Podhoretz (5:44)

And it was a gorgeous mosaic.

Eliana Johnson (5:47)

Right?

Abe Greenwald (5:47)

Yes. So this, this, this clip, clip goes around of Newsom saying, look, I'm just like you guys, or I'm just like you. He's looking at the mayor he's looking at the audience. He says, I got. I got 960 on my SATs. You've never seen me. I'm no better than you. I. I'm not talking down to you. I want you to know that I am like you, and I got a 960 on my SATs. Not trying to. Don't feel bad if you got a 940. I'm not trying to say I'm better than you. And you've never seen me read a speech, because I cannot read a speech. Okay?

John Podhoretz (6:33)

So

Abe Greenwald (6:36)

the initial social media frenzy over this, like the first tweet about it, framed it as something like Newsom talks to a largely black audience and says this. Now, I've seen various clips, again, as I said, of the audience. It's everything. It's Atlanta. One can assume Atlanta has long been a huge African American hub, that there's people of varying races in the audience. Do I think that the. The message was in some sense geared toward minorities? Yeah, I do. I think that's. This is the way that certain Democrats speak to minorities. I also think that he had a larger message which was, look, I'm no better than any of you. I'm. I'm. I'm as stupid as you are. Because as this came out, then he was answering a question. Question. It turned. It turned out he was answering a question about having dyslexia. What do you have to say to us about having dyslexia? And that was his answer. So that is. Framing is supposed to be a defense that he was talking about his dyslexia. But if you ask me, he's saying, because I have a condition that puts me at the same level as you. I'm just like you because I've been lowered by this problem. I was ashamed because I think he was talking down to minorities the way that Kathy Hochul had said that black kids in the Bronx don't know what the word computer means. The way Joe Biden said poor kids are just as smart as white kids. And. And on and on. We have. We have a record of this kind of thing.

Eliana Johnson (8:45)

Don't forget Biden saying, if you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or for Trump, then you ain't black, Right?

Abe Greenwald (8:52)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. These, and these were on. These were on urban radio shows and stuff. Yeah.

John Podhoretz (8:57)

So they're going to put you all

Abe Greenwald (9:00)

y' all back in chains.

John Podhoretz (9:01)

Yeah, yeah.

Abe Greenwald (9:03)

So I think it is shameful. And I think no matter how he frames it, this thing blew up for a good Reason, it was a really dumb, offensive effort for him to evade the fact that he is as elite as they come.

Eliana Johnson (9:25)

Okay, Elian, I saw it. Oh, sorry, were you going to ask?

John Podhoretz (9:29)

No, no, no, you go ahead.

Eliana Johnson (9:33)

I, I don't disagree with any of that, but I, I had a slightly different bounce, which is, I think this is the beginning of an attempt by Newsom, who looks and benefits from coming off like a slick, wealthy guy. That's part and parcel of his appeal to many people. He's handsome, you know, he, he eats at French Laundry. He gets, you know, the Vogue, women love him and I forget whatever the phrase they used, but let's just get this out of the way. He's astonishingly handsome or whatever it was they said. So those people like him. But now. But he also wants to appeal to the Democratic Party's, you know, base of African Americans and the working class whites that have fled the party to Republicans. And I think this is the beginning of his attempt, when he runs for president, to appeal to normal people, of which he is very much not one. His father was, you know, he's, he's emphasized his mother throughout his political career, who was a single mother and did at times work several jobs to, to make ends meet. However, his father was the best friend of Gordon Getty, and Newsom benefited at every step of his political career from Getty's support. And he's, he was born into enormous privilege. So I read him as trying to be relatable. At the same time, the irony is that I don't think the average person, to the average person talking about SAT scores is a relatable thing in the least. I think that is something that those we on the commentary podcast talk about. We're concerned with the way our kids perform on standardized tests. They. This is not the concern of the ordinary person who has fled the Democratic Party. I'm sorry.

John Podhoretz (11:42)

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Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com/complyment let's talk about Aura Frame. So I have an Aura Frame in the middle of my living room and last night I glanced up at it and there I saw a photograph. Actually two photographs split in half because Aura does that for you. It sort of seems to understand what photos are related to each other and will kind of edit them for you to put them together in the frame. And there was a picture of my late mother and my late sister Rachel side by side. And I was of course very moved and pleased and touched to have this memory placed right in front of me in my living room for me to experience almost unexpectedly. And that is one of the great gifts that Aura Frames can offer. This is a wonderful, beautiful piece of living room, bedroom, whatever. I wouldn't call it furniture, but it's literally a photo frame. 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Just to unpack because I think it would be helpful to unpack. You mentioned Gordon Getty Newsom, I think is 58 or 59 years old for people. So I'm a couple years older than he is. You have to understand what the what the name Getty meant when he was younger, because it does not mean what it meant then. J. Paul Getty, the father or grandfather, I think father of Gordon Getty, was the richest man in America. And he was famously. The word Getty was what billionaire means now. And he was an awful, famously awful person. J. Paul Getty, and famously refused to pay a ransom for his grandson, who was kidnapped and had his ear cut off and mailed to his grandfather. As we are now right in the middle of this kidnapping horror involving Savannah Guthrie. It's sort of an interesting moment to reflect on the fact that, you know, this happened more frequently in the past, and that. So the Getty family was the symbol of heartless, massive wealth that was also simultaneously heartless and with a kind of very evil tinge to it. So that Newsom, as a kid, his father was. Was Gordon Getty's best friend. And he traveled with his father around the world with Gordon Getty on Gordon Getty's plane or whatever, and did all this kind of stuff. And it's a little like him pretending that, you know, he's there with his single mother, but, you know, then every. Every couple of months, you know, he got to, like, go to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro with the son of the richest man in the world. And being just plain folks, there are cards you can play in American politics, which people play. And sometimes it's very complicated in American politics to be a rich person or to be a person of privilege because of this question of whether or not you can make yourself relatable to enough people. Politicians do all kind. Play all kinds of games or come up with all kinds of rhetorical tricks to deal with this George H.W. bush, who was himself the son of a senator and a. And, you know, like, from this immensely wealthy family, his game was, aside from the real thing, which is he was, you know, this great war hero. You know, flew 58 combat missions. You know, his plane crashed into the ocean. He had to be rescued after eight hours, but went to Yale, got out of Yale. And then, as he put it in his convention speech, you know, he needed to strike out for the territories. So he and Barbara got in their little car and they drove to Texas to try to make something of themselves, you know, to show that they had that can do spirit. Because you do need. Somehow people think you need to do something about wealth. Trump is the first really rich guy to run for office who is like, hey, vote for me. I'm a really rich guy. I'm a rich guy. So I know how Rich guys work. I know what it's like. I'm successful. I can make America successful as a rich guy. Ross Perot did this, too. But of course he did. Go ahead.

Abe Greenwald (18:28)

I just want to say one thing about Trump's ability to do that. First of all, he has, he had no ability to do any, anything else. He, There was no game available to him. He wasn't going to, you know, in his psyche. But the other thing is that Trump could do that. He could sort of crack the code because he does genuinely share the cultural tastes of, of a lot of the common man.

John Podhoretz (18:54)

Right.

Abe Greenwald (18:55)

While also being. Isn't it. Look at all this gold.

John Podhoretz (18:58)

Right. So. Right. So it's the opposite.

Seth Mandel (18:59)

I mean, that's that. And further to that, like, the people that I knew, you know, the friends that I knew growing up who had Trump's books on their shelf were like, you know, kids who, you know, felt like the rest of the world had a leg up on them, and they, you know, had the odds were stacked against them because of whatever their, you know, personal situation. And they, and they liked Trump's reputation as a guy who flamed out, rebuilt. Flamed out, rebuilt. You know, the fact that he had failed and then rebuilt things and his own sort of reputation and his own name and his own brand and whatever, that was a key thing. A lot of these guys don't actually say, look, I went bankrupt six times. I'm like, you, right? But Trump has this, Everybody knows his story. And Trump has this series of failures. And that changes, I think, the way, like, you don't view him, the way you, Mitt Romney, in terms of, like, whether he understands, you know, what people go through or whatever.

John Podhoretz (20:07)

I agree with that. I think the point here is that Trump was a, was a rich kid, grew up as a rich kid and lived as a rich kid, but didn't have heirs. And the Newsom is almost exactly the opposite, which is he didn't really grow up rich, but he sure has heirs. And he had heirs his entire political life. And he married two glamorous women, one of whom was rich herself before she met him. And, you know, was a, like a, was a young Hollywood actress and producer. And he's glam and he goes to the French Laundry. During COVID while everybody.

Eliana Johnson (20:51)

I was about to say Trump likes McDonald's and Newsom likes the French Laundry.

John Podhoretz (20:55)

Yeah, French Laundry. I've been to the French Laundry, and it's pretty great. I just want to say I, I, if I were Gavin Newsom, I, too, would go to the French laundry. It's a schlep to get to. But I did, I did it once. And, and so I can't fault him for going, except, of course, he should have been impeached and removed from office for going there when he wasn't allowing people to walk on a beach under emergency statutes in California. But just to get back to the point, so what Newsom does in order to say, I'm just plain folks is play this bizarre thing that stumblebum liberals and really stumblebum liberals do when they are trying to make common cause with the minorities in their coalition. And it's unique. Conservatives have a lot of problems with minorities and those problems are often merited and justified. So I don't want to go into that time, what we're talking about today. But liberal racism is a real thing and it has the quality of, oh, you're such a, you're such an idiot child. As an American minority, I need to come in and take care of you. You don't do well on your SATs. You don't know how to use a computer. You have all of these strikes against you.

Seth Mandel (22:20)

It's a kind of French laundry as a dry cleaners.

John Podhoretz (22:23)

It's just a kind of social Darwinism of the left. It's like, we are, you are life's losers. And it is our moral obligation. We're not like these heartless Republicans and conservatives. It's our moral obligation to enfold you in government largesse and take care of you because you're all a bunch of low talent, low IQ morons. And that's why it resonated, because they don't want to think this of themselves. But, you know, who knows that they're like this? Black people, Hispanic people, they know it. They know condescension when they see it and feel it and hear it. And we know it because they're always accusing us of being racist. And we're like, everybody should be judged from the same. At the. By the same standards. And so how is that exactly racist? You know, that's not. You could call it many things, including heartless. You could say it doesn't take. It doesn't take account of the kind of social pathologies that were created by institutionalized racism in the past. You can say all kinds of things that are worth having conversations about, but you can't say that it's racialist in that it assumes now there are people on the right who are like this, who are essentialist and believe that, you know, blacks have lower IQs and Hispanics and so they have to be treated accordingly. But that's not the conservative point of view. The liberal point of view is the question is if you peel away support for affirmative action, support for government welfare programs and all of that is what you're actually seeing. White people saying black people and brown people cannot take care of themselves because they're just too dumb and too pathologized. And they're, they're, they're, you can't throw them into prison because it's not fair because they're all going to go to prison if you do that and that kind of thing. And so there are these moments when it flares up and Newsom did it. I mean, I don't care. There's an Eliana, you just sent me this thing. Was it from Politico? I can't. From some newsletter.

Eliana Johnson (24:38)

I was about to say, can we spend a moment on the media coverage of this?

John Podhoretz (24:42)

Well, that's. Yes, let's go there.

Eliana Johnson (24:45)

Because my, my hate read in the morning is Politico Playbook, which is circling the drain, no longer influential. But don't worry, I'm there reading it so that you guys don't have to.

John Podhoretz (24:58)

That is so good of you. Thank you.

Eliana Johnson (25:01)

You're welcome. We got a window. We saw this during the Biden administration, but we got a window into the presses, you know, the, the legacy media's beginning, you know, devotion to advancing the presidential campaign of Gavin Newsom. In the coverage of this as MAGA media, a row between Gavin Newsom and MAGA media as opposed to a controversy stirred up by an ill considered remark that Gavin Newsom made. The truth is Newsom stepped in it. He said something awkward that he shouldn't have said. And on the day, on the eve of the publication of his book, Politico Playbook covers it as follows. A snippet of Newsom went viral in right wing circles after an X account reported that Newsom had said to a black crowd, you know, so and so thing. Here's how Politico Playbook frames it. Just one problem. Newsom has made the same comment multiple times before, repeatedly framing his struggles with dyslexia and academics as experiences that made him relatable to the average American. And the. And the audience to which Newsom was speaking was actually mixed race. His audience told the LA Times is Taryn Luna. This part where the press takes the response of a flack we saw all the time during the Biden administration and magnifies it. This is just simply not what would happen were it a Republican Just one problem with what you reported about the Democrat, the flax or the Republican, the flack says it's not true. And we do this all the time when we see this all the time. When the Beacon reports a story, they would go to the Biden administration and say the fact checkers would say it's not true. According to Biden press secretary or, you know, Department of Health and Human Services spokesman. It is, you know, it's incredible. But I predict we will see this over and over again. The first is controversies framed as Newsom or whoever the Democratic candidate is versus, you know, the right wing, the right wing stirring up a controversy. And the second is something's not true because the spokesman said it's not true.

John Podhoretz (27:42)

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James Patterson (29:01)

I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James. And I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon. And this is a really terrific list. I think you'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay. BJ Novak.

John Podhoretz (29:28)

Yay.

James Patterson (29:28)

Kathy Bates, Dolly Parton, Josh Gad, and Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows? Maybe he'll show up. Hungry dogs run faster. Thank you, Grandma, for turning me into a hopeless obsessive Compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

John Podhoretz (29:59)

Couple of other facts. Newsom's like, I'm like you. I got a 960. Average SAT score is 1050. So not only is he saying, I'm like you, I'm an idiot. I'm not an idiot. I can't read a speech. I can't read a speech. I'm like you. I can't read a speech. And I got 9A. He did worse on his SATs than the average person. So he could say, you know what? I'm really coming to you, hat in hand as a very modest person, because I did worse than you on my SATs. He said, I've struggled, I've had struggles. I got a 960 on my SATs. I can't read a speech. What is that? Have empathy for me? Feel sorry for me? I'm the governor of the largest state in the Union, and I can't read a speech if he's saying, I've overcome a lot, that I have this, you know, I don't even know. I don't think you even call it. Dyslexia is a very broad term for a very large number of things. Susan Crabtree, who writes it, is disability.

Abe Greenwald (31:08)

It's considered a disability.

John Podhoretz (31:09)

It's classified as a disability, but it's a very. The word lexia now means is like. Is like a spectrum, is a wild spectrum.

Seth Mandel (31:18)

And I just want to know if he's. If he can't read a speech as the teleprompter, a series of pictographs.

John Podhoretz (31:25)

I. You know what? I've never heard him deliver a speech. So maybe he just does it extemporaneously, which, by the way, is better in some ways. Like, that's like being someone in the House of Commons, right? Where. Where the tradition is you don't write down a speech. You. You speak. You speak extemporaneously anyway. All right, so Newsom says, born in some mid-60s, I guess. I mean, if he's 58, I don't know. It's whatever late 60s says he was. He had dyslexia. I'm just saying, from my recollection of life in the 1970s in schools and stuff like that, the people who were diagnosed with dyslexia were extremely severely dyslexic, by which I mean they could not. They could not decipher words. Like, it all swam. Things swam around and it was a. It was then, you know, it was people who were, like, unable to process information by looking at words on a piece of paper. And that is still a classic definition of, like, hard dyslexia. I don't think he had that designation. I think he's somebody, based on what I can tell. And Susan Crabtree went back. Went to. And if he had, it would have been a very big deal. Like, my mother had a colleague at a publishing house, his daughter. This is in the, like, mid to late 70s. So when I first heard the word dyslexia had this condition called dyslexia, he was a publisher. She could not read. She could do math. She could do other. So she could not read. And it was a great. You know, it was incredibly tragic and horrifying, Tim, because this, of course, is what he did for a living. That's why it stuck in my head, this fact about dyslexia. Susan Crabtree went to. Who went to Gavin Newsom's people and said, can we see documentation of his condition? Like, what. What. What. What. What happened? Like, what kind of dyslexia was he diagnosed with? Since he's brought it up, you know, and if he wants us to think about the struggles he's had, go into it. Tell us what, you know, what a neuropsych showed he was suffering from and how it worked and how he overcame it. And the flack wrote back and said, dear Susan, F off. Thank you, Flack for Gavin Newsom. Now, I'm sorry, he's the one who brought it up. She didn't bring up his dyslexia. And he's written a book in which he talks about dyslexia. She's like, okay, let's flesh this out. You're dyslexic. What kind of dyslexia do you suffer from? Is it the kind of dyslexia where you have to read really slowly or you got some. You learned a technique to read that other people didn't have to use to read? Who can. Who can use phonics or whatever like that. This would be interesting. Let's go into this. And he and his people responded to this violently. He said, oh, look at you. You don't give a. I can't remember who he said this to. Newsom in a tweet, maybe to Ted Cruz is like, sean Hannity, give an F to whom?

Abe Greenwald (35:05)

Hannity.

John Podhoretz (35:06)

Hannity. Oh, you didn't give an F when Trump was a racist or something like that. That's like, buddy, you are. Why Are you deflecting?

Seth Mandel (35:16)

Not just deflecting, but can we talk also about the, the means of deflection? This is becoming really popular. I mean, not becoming. It has been for several years. Democrats these days really like to curse. There's something about specifically she wasn't told, you know, to tell the reporter no comment. And she wasn't told, you know, we've all had politicians do, like, really obnoxious stuff to us when they don't want us to get the story. They wanted to publicly curse at the reporter. That why that was the play. And there's something about all this cursing that is. Is that aligns with what Newsom is trying to do in another way, which is be relatable. And the Democrats think that normal people curse like sailors. And so they're like, we're going to show you that we're angry. Progressives are angry. We're going to show you. You think we're not angry just because, you know, we're sitting in Congress and I made $10 million flipping stocks on Inside Information yesterday or whatever, you know. But let me tell you, F. Trump. And then it's like, oh, okay, I didn't. I thought you weren't angry enough.

John Podhoretz (36:30)

Well, there's a commercial now.

Seth Mandel (36:32)

I know that you're angry.

John Podhoretz (36:34)

So there is a member of someone running for Congress, can't remember who it is. Democrat. And the first viral video, you know, effort to create a viral video is a series of people just saying F TRUMP on TikTok. So you're right. This has become like an authenticity. This is like, this is like a fake authenticity challenge. I remember, by the way you bring this up, it's like this idea that people just sort of curse and maybe, look, I curse a lot, so I'm not, you know, I'm not going to judge anybody for, for cursing. But I remember Nora Ephron once saying, what is a thing about the past that you think people don't know or don't understand? And Nora Ephron said, In the 1950s and 1960s, nobody cursed. In other words, like there was no. It's not like you go back, you watch a movie set in the 1950s and people are dropping. Or TV shows set in the 1950s and people are dropping the F bomb all the time. And that did not happen. May have happened at work. It may have happened in certain kind of male precincts at a Kiwanis club when everybody was drunk or in the military or something like that. But it was not common parlance. People did not curse the way they curse now. It's anachronistic now. It's like if you don't curse now, it would be like someone from 2070, when we get over this cursing, like fetish saying, you know, being asked that question like Nora Ephron and saying, you know, back in 2026, everybody, including the President, United States, cursed five times a day. You know, it's like that. But you're right, it's like some kind of weird, bizarre shorthand. It's like, I'm not a nerd. F you. You know, I'm not. What do you think I. What I really care about is Social Security indexing. F you. You know, so like, don't think I'm not like you because I talk like you. But just in the same way that there are probably 150 million people in America who do not curse and do not find it relatable and are jarred by it. And I don't want leaders to talk that way.

Abe Greenwald (38:56)

Also, I think it's the Democrats trying to get in on the Trump or trying to catch up to Trump breaking norms and being outrageous. And as with all such attempts to catch up with or to sort of match the other side in some way, you perceive the other side to be. It, it comes off as terribly inauthentic, over planned and embarrassing.

John Podhoretz (39:32)

You know, it's just, it's an interesting thing because like Obama, you know, Democrats, I think understandably complain or liberals understandably complain. From this vantage point today, it's like, what did conservatives yell about with Obama, right? It was like he wore a tan suit one day and that was disrespectful. Like, you do think, oh my God, that really was a thing for a couple of days. How on earth could that be a thing given everything that's happened in America since Obama stopped being president? Does have a taste issue. Obama a little bit. Nobody who approved the plan for that library in Chicago can be accused of having anything but the most horrific taste. Like if Trump is, you know, screwing up the White House, Obama has just screwed up the south side of Chicago forever by building this death Star, you know, on, on Garfield Boulevard. But nonetheless, it is kind of amazing. So, yeah, you have norm breaking, so then you got to break norms. You got to break norms. But if Newsom's way of breaking a norm as a, as an elite Californian, good looking guy who spent his life, you know, in a, you know, in, in proximity to or part of a world of immense privilege, says, here's how I'm gonna do it, you and I. We both did really badly on the sat and so therefore, you should like me. And then when somebody goes, that's really. You're kind of painting with a pretty broad brush there, Mr. Newsome. He's like, oh, yeah, f you. You don't. You don't call out Trump for being a racist. Like, instead of saying, that's not what I meant. Like, there are things he could have said. Like, he could have put out tweets saying, obviously, I didn't. Wasn't talking to black people in the audience. I was saying I had challenges, and I understand people who have challenges and are therefore have to, like, do. Make their way in life without a high SAT score.

Abe Greenwald (41:37)

You know what it reminds me of?

John Podhoretz (41:38)

She doesn't really. But, okay, there was a. He doesn't really know what people are like, who could have to get through life with a low SAT store because he had other advantages that mitigated his bad SAT score.

Abe Greenwald (41:52)

This. This is what it reminded me of. There was an interview, Barbara Walters interview of Barbra Streisand, 70s or 80s, I don't remember when I was a kid. And Barbara Walters said, what's a misconception that people have about you? And Barbara Streisand thought for a while, and she said, I think they think I'm perfect.

John Podhoretz (42:22)

Oh, my God.

Abe Greenwald (42:24)

But that was this.

Seth Mandel (42:26)

What would you say is your biggest weakness? I care too much.

Abe Greenwald (42:29)

Yeah.

John Podhoretz (42:30)

Yeah, that's. Yes, that's one of my. One of my favorites. That is a.

Abe Greenwald (42:34)

That.

John Podhoretz (42:34)

That is a. Yeah, that's. That whole. That was, by the way, one of the ways in which Trump. Trump's norm breaking was like a great moment, actually a positive changing moment in American life. When they did that thing at one of the debates in 2015, where it's like, you know, what's the biggest mistake you've ever made? Which is, like, a horrible question. I don't. You know, it's like, don't do that to people. What. Why are you doing that? Like, you're just putting people on the spot looking for, you know, it's like. Or something like, you know, what mistake do you make? Or what do you. You know, what's your weakness? Or something like that. And then Trump said, my weakness is that I don't punish my enemies enough. You know, my weakness is that I don't go after people when they lie about me. But I, you know, if. When I don't do that, that's my weakness. And it was like, okay, you know what? I guess we have to drop this question now. Forever, because he has said the one thing you're not supposed to say, and he's gotten away with it. So I don't think this question is really gonna. Is gonna survive if we can move on from the. This kind of preposterous. Okay, before we do, Newsom is one of the top two or three people at this moment in the running for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Not quite clear why. It's an interesting thing he's done to himself because he did have a really potent moment in 2025 when he engineered this referendum that pulled. That basically meant that Democrats were going to gain five seats in a midterm redistricting plan in California, thus completely eliminating the clearly backfired Trump Republican effort to redistrict midterm, mid, mid decade to help them in 2026. And he did it himself, and he pulled it off, and it was very politically impressive. And it's something that he could have, you know, used to run on in 2028. How. But on the other hand, people forget that, and it's policy, and it says, do you think something like this has legs? Do you think he can sort of like, he can mitigate it, or is this like a burr? Like this is like one of these things that people are going to remember, these weird cultural moments that people remember about politicians they don't know much about. I'm not sure, because it does involve the sat. And as. And as Eliana says, I'm not sure the SAT is like saying, you know, I don't know how, how much, how much rent is, or something like that, but maybe it will. I don't know.

Abe Greenwald (45:17)

It's also very early. You know, by the time we get around to the actual election season, this is going to. This is going to be buried by so much else. But, I mean, it's not good to get off to such a tremendously stumbling start.

John Podhoretz (45:38)

Elliot, I don't.

Eliana Johnson (45:41)

I don't think. My guess would be it's not going to matter for him in the confines of a Democratic primary. I'm looking at Newsom's stumble here compared to the stumbles of some of his potential competitors in that race. Look at AOC performance in Munich. Look at Gretchen Whitmer's performance in Munich. Those, to me, seemed much more serious and catastrophic and provided a window into their probably fatal flaws. You know, aoc, who I really thought I was taking seriously as a candidate for president, because I think that's where the energy of the party is. And she called the New York Times to whine about the coverage of that and then followed up with a video posted to social media in which she appeared to be almost in tears, continuing to complain about that. Newsom has a sort of brazenness. You know, he, he does seem to be drawing lessons from Trump and taking these kind of things in stride and brazening his way through them. And that includes the response of his press folks to reporters for now. So my guess would be this doesn't impact him that much. The question to me with Newsom is what impact his actual record will have in that primary. As we saw when his potential successors in the California gubernatorial primary were debating and really having a food fight about the terrible record that he's left in California, the condition of that state. And it truly. You could have made an attack ad from the debate among Democrats over the state of California against Newsom. That's sort of the open question for me.

John Podhoretz (47:43)

I. Seth, you have.

Seth Mandel (47:45)

Yeah, I, I think he's actually benefiting from getting out there early and stumbling in non monumental ways repeatedly. I think he has looked ridiculous several times and I think it's actually now providing some sort of, you know, immunity. I think, I think it's, he's, you know, it's like he's getting, he's, he's getting the jab. He's now got his, his third Covid shot, his third public embarrassment shot or whatever. But where you take a smaller dose of the thing that, you know, if you got the full thing, it would kill you. He's taking a smaller dose, building up this kind of immunity. And I think that he, as long as the stumbles don't go crazy, I actually think that he's, you know, that there's something about this that has become part of his Persona. He looks like, you know, he looks like he's trying to look like the cool kid. And if you do that once, you know, and then back off, it's sort of embarrassing. But I think the fact that he's doing it repeatedly is adding weirdly to his charm. He has like an okay, Boomer charm where it's like, oh, Gavin Newsome, like, we all know he's rich. We all know he's privileged. We, we all know he's this, what a silly guy, whatever. And I actually think that, you know, when it first started out, I said, how could this guy possibly win? But he's still there. He doesn't seem to be getting knocked down. And I think it's, he's just building up as a kind of silly, you Know, we all know what's really going on here.

John Podhoretz (49:23)

He's just, you know, look, candidates make bad impressions early. I mean, it is. These can be, you know, if you look at it as a kind of extended spring training or extended. Maybe spring basic training or something like that. Like, you know, Bill Clinton, obviously, his major national debut, which was at the 1988 convention, was a disaster. And he then spent four years painstakingly trying to mollify and recreate his image in. In leading up to running in 1992. He went on the Arsenio Hall Show. He played the. He played the saxophone. He gave. You know, he invited people down to the. To the. To Little Rock. They had, you know, barbecue together. He turned on the charm. He obviously was a. You know, he had. He had made a blunder in trying to be too serious, too substantive and too boring. Too young and learned. George W. Bush, far in the lead in. Before the 2000 election, like, 15 points up, not only on any other Republican that was named in polls, but 15 points up on Gore, like, from the beginning of 1999, amazingly enough. But he did terribly in 1999. He would give. People would go down to Texas to meet him, and they would come back and say, he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. He was really bad at interviews. He made some media appearances that were really cringe inducing. And he, over time, painstakingly came up with a strategy of how to run for president. He delivered very substantive speeches. That was one thing that he sometimes counter Republican orthodoxy. Made a big speech at the Manhattan Institute about how we shouldn't balance the budget on the backs of the poor or say some other stuff like that, or attacking. Talking about compassion and conservatism. But he was so problematic that he made this big opening for John McCain on the grounds that he really looked like he was not ready to run for the presidency. But he had two years of Runway. So the question is, is Newsom. Will Newsom be able to learn from his mistakes and, like, hone his Persona and his approach, or is the fu. World. Does that make it much harder for people like him? Like, he's always got to be on the defensive. He's always got to be on the attack, as opposed to going, you know what? I just learned something. Let's go. Me and my team, we're going to go inside and say, what did I do wrong here? How do I not make this stumble? Or how do I use it to my advantage by playing off against it or using it as a weapon? Or something like that. And I don't see him as having, you know, he's a very surface guy. That's the problem. So I think that's the problem. And we're seeing his surface, you know, in a way that we haven't.

Eliana Johnson (52:31)

I think the other problem with him is like, a lack of. When you say he a real surface guy. He's governed very left in California and then is trying to portray himself really as a moderate when he talks to. You know, he's done this podcast in order, obviously, to endear himself to more moderates.

Abe Greenwald (52:52)

And.

Eliana Johnson (52:52)

And you can't fool people into thinking that you're somebody you're not. And I think that's really going to be his core problem. His primary opponents will call him on that, and certainly in a general election, he'll be called on that. Kamala Harris, this is what tripped her up. She was somebody on the far left. She tried to run away from that in a general election and never to stake a position on anything. And people saw through it.

Abe Greenwald (53:21)

Yeah, this is what I'm thinking this whole time. Is that the problem that I don't see how he. It's possible, how he can maneuver out of is this inauthenticity problem. And it's not just the Kamala Harris lesson. Democrats now look back on the Biden presidency and the way that there was this entire front manufactured that had nothing to do with what was really happening with Joe Biden's White House and with. With the president himself. And the authenticity factor for them is. Is pretty important now, I think. So. Even though AOC melted down and then melted down about being criticized about melting down. And she is her. She is who she is. You know, Newsom's trying on different suits.

John Podhoretz (54:19)

See, this is my point, which is she could also learn she had a maiden foreign policy appearance. I don't mean maiden, because she's female. It was like her debut on the foreign policy stage, and she whiffed. She blew it. The thing to do is to go back and say, what did I do wrong? What do I need to learn? Who's going to teach me? What do I need to read? And then eight months from now, I'll go give a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations or write an article

Seth Mandel (54:47)

over Newsom because Newsom can't read.

John Podhoretz (54:51)

Fair enough. Anyway, I'm just saying, I think, like, that's what you do. If you're serious. Like, you go, okay, oops. Like, if you're. If you. You know, if you're a batter and you strike out 300 times in a season. You go to a batting coach and say, what do I need to do to fix my stance so that I don't do that again next year? Like, but so much, so much militates against that now because you're supposed to constantly defend yourself and attack people who attack you as opposed to going to ground and saying, okay, I need to give myself an education for a year if I'm really seriously going to run for president. This is no joke. Which is why I look at some of these people and I think that yet again, as was true in 2014, as was true in 2006, as was true in 1990, we may not be seeing or have any idea who is actually going to be the Democratic nominee and who is going to be the president in 2028. I think there is enough history to say that the people who look like the conventional candidates, people don't necessarily like the conventional candidates and they will look elsewhere. I don't know. And so by definition, I don't know who that is. It means it's not the governor of California or the governor of Illinois or the governor of Kentucky or the governor of New York, you know, whatever, or you know, the former governor of, of of North Carolina. It's not going to be any of them.

Seth Mandel (56:31)

Because you're saying it's not going to be Andrew Cuomo.

John Podhoretz (56:33)

Yeah, well, you never know. I mean, that, that would be, that would be one hell of a comeback. I mean, like we had that race in the Republican primary in 2015 in which every A list talent in the Republican Party ran for prep. Any one of them was a credit. Almost any one of them was a credible person to you could see in the Oval Office. And then this lunatic rich guy, vulgarian maniac just comes up on the side and knocks them all over like bowling pins. I don't know who that is in the. Again among the Democrats. Of course, it also happened in the New York mayoral race, which is not, which is not a real, is kind of, maybe a kind of a synecdoche for the Democratic Party party writ large going into 2028. If it's moving this far left and has the kind of coloration that it has.

Abe Greenwald (57:29)

And by the way, on, on the authenticity question, Mamdani just came out and said, look, I'm a, I'm an anti Zionist socialist radical.

John Podhoretz (57:39)

Yeah, I know.

Abe Greenwald (57:40)

You know, so he didn't run away from anything.

John Podhoretz (57:42)

Yeah, right. So I, I'm just saying, I think that watching Whitmer and, and Newsom fail, essentially in late 2025, early 2026. You know, I'm like, I, you know, Mark Kelly again, also, but that he would be kind of conventional, too. He's a senator. I just don't know. It just, it doesn't feel like, you

Seth Mandel (58:07)

know, Mark Kelly is also like. And he's also. There's also the immigration issue, which some of these guys really are still, still have kind of establishment opinions on immigration. And Mark Kelly is one of them. Yeah. I mean, I think that you, you do have talented Democrats, interesting Democrats who end up in these, like, Christian cinema spots. But there's no place. There's. There's nothing. There's no, there's no way to get promoted from that spot. It's like, it's really, really valuable to the Democratic Party, Obama.

John Podhoretz (58:38)

Right.

Seth Mandel (58:39)

You know, to have both Arizona seats, whatever, all this stuff. But it doesn't mean that there's a path for you to be the party leader or, you know, go anywhere up from there anyway.

John Podhoretz (58:49)

Like, somebody could emerge, you know, literally during this 2006 campaign season that we've never even be. I mean, I'm not going to say that James Talarico in Texas is a guy and he's going to be president in 2029, but, I mean, it's so easy to become a celebrity now. It's so easy to come out of nowhere. People are looking for novelty people to follow and to pay attention to. And I just think, like, unless somebody is like a perfect. Karl Rove said that George W. Bush was. Had been like, cooked in a lab to be a perfect Republican presidential candidate. And he was right. And he was right. Even though Bush had all these stumbles that actually, in the end helped him because it meant that he was. He had a hard race to get himself to the nomination against McCain. That actually matured him and cooked him a little bit so that when he had to run against Gore, he was actually a better candidate than he had been before. He faced a real challenge. I just, you know, I don't know that any of these guys are that for the Democrats. And like I say, it takes nothing to become a novelty winner. That's my. Okay, I want to make a recommendation that we can go. There's a movie that you can watch on Hulu. It's called Splitsville. It came out last year. It's a sort of a small American comedy. The only na. The. They're the two named actors in it that you would know are Dakota Johnson and Andrea Arjona, who is. Who was like in Hitman Last year it was written and directed by the two male leads, Michelangelo Contino and Kyle Marvin. And it's a story about two couples getting divorced who had. The men are two best friends. And that is to describe it like. That is to describe There's Something About Mary as a story about a guy who hires a private detective to find the girl that he was in love with in high school. Like, that's the structure of There's Something About Mary. But of course, there's Something About Mary is the wildest comedy, wildest goes on wild, crazy, insane tangents that go absolutely haywire. And that is exactly what Splitsville is like. It's, you know, two couples that are. That are. One's breaking up and the other has an open marriage that isn't working. But it plays crazy, hilarious riffs. It's very dirty. So I do want to.

Seth Mandel (61:33)

The couple is really like the main couple of the. It's really a love story between the two guys.

John Podhoretz (61:39)

You've seen it?

Seth Mandel (61:40)

I've seen it, yeah.

John Podhoretz (61:41)

You've seen it, yeah. It's a love story.

Seth Mandel (61:43)

It goes crazy, it goes wacky in all sorts of different directions. It's very unexpected. It's very. It's unusual. It can be very funny at times. And all the actors play their roles really to a T. I mean, everybody plays the character very well and it moves. It moves along quickly. It's pretty. It's. It's well done. But you really get the sense that like that the rock. The rock is the relationship between the two guys. And I can't explain more without ruining part of it.

John Podhoretz (62:10)

You don't want to ruin it. But as I say, one of the things about it is that it's. As I say, it's built on the framework of this conventional story about two marriages in trouble. But it's really like a series of extended, wild, slapstick plot sketches. And I thought the first hour of this movie was among the funniest things I've seen in many, many, many years. And so I really do heartily recommend it with the proviso that it's pretty dirty and. And. And goes in dark places also. So don't watch it with your kids in the room anyway, if you have kids under 16 or something, anyway. But that's Splitsville on Hulu. Probably. You can get it on PVOD or something like that. But anyway, very, very impressive work by Michelangelo Covino, who directed it, and Kyle Marvin, who wrote it and stars in it and is the. And co. Wrote it with. With Covino. They also. They made an earlier movie called the Climb, which is about also two friends who go on an incredibly punishing bike ride that also goes off in crazy directions, but it's not as accomplished as splits film. So we'll be back tomorrow. For Eliana, Abe and Seth, I'm John Pod Horiz. Keep the camel burning.

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