Harris with money and memes, but now, the backlash.

Sean Hannity: Here's just one reason that voters seem to detest Kamala Harris.

[laughter]

Jamilah King: She's been the butt of a lot of jokes, whether it's her laugh, the type of cookware she buys, and what folks have called her word salad.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, Ezra Klein responds to claims that the media, himself included, are responsible for forcing out Joe Biden.

Micah Loewinger: The President is too old possibly to serve again, and the party is now in chaos. The idea that the media wouldn't aggressively cover that just seems very strange to me. It's all coming up after this.

From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Been another busy week, am I right?

President Joe Biden: I believe, I reckon as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America's future all merited a second term.

Brooke Gladstone: Next came the most salient phrase in Joe Biden's historic speech Wednesday.

President Joe Biden: Nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition.

Brooke Gladstone: President Joe Biden made way for Vice President Kamala Harris, who some polls said was more likely to carry the Democrats' torch across the finish line and back to the White House. It changed the game, but it's still a game.

J.D. Vance: I don't know, Kamala. I served in the United States Marine Corps, and I built a business. What the hell have you done other than collect the government check for the past 20 years?

Brooke Gladstone: Wow. Isn't that what J.D. Vance himself is collecting and campaigning to collect for another four years? When you think about it, isn't that a slight on every single public servant? There's over 4 million of them working for the federal government, half of whom are military personnel, and way more are working for state and local governments. He makes it sound like welfare. Not that there's anything wrong with welfare.

Brooke Gladstone: About that venture capital business he built after working for his mentor, Silicon Valley billionaire and right-wing political activist, Peter Thiel. There's not much to say about that yet, except that one of the businesses Vance invested heavily in did go belly up, as did his charity. As for Harris, after working through the '90s as a deputy district attorney in Oakland, California, prosecuting gang members, drug traffickers, and sexual abusers, she rose to district attorney and then, in a squeaker, was elected California attorney general, the first woman or African American ever in the post.

Brooke Gladstone: Once there, she bucked pressure from higher-ups, even Barack Obama, who wanted her to settle a nationwide lawsuit against mortgage lenders. Instead, she won a very hefty judgment. She refused to defend California's Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage and was overturned in 2013. Then she became a US senator, known for tough interrogations. That's what she was doing for the last 20 years. What she wasn't doing, for reasons that are none of my business, was having children.

J.D. Vance: We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, be it via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.

Brooke Gladstone: Three years ago, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, Vance blasted scorn on the childless. He's fearless, especially when you consider a 2022 study of 1,500 adults in Michigan, which found that 21.64% of adults are choosing to be child-free. Now, that's just Michigan. That state is demographically similar to the US in terms of race, age, education, and income, according to the 2021 census. If we extrapolate, that's like 50 to 60 million American voters. Vance is dissed. That's not counting the cat gentleman.

J.D. Vance: It's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC--the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. How does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?

Brooke Gladstone: By the way, George Washington didn't have kids either. Mayor Pete, however, is raising twins, and Kamala is apparently a beloved stepmom. Then there's the race stuff. We'll get to that in a couple of minutes.

Micah Loewinger: What seems to bother MAGA most is that they were blindsided when they should have been prepared.

Stephen Miller: They held a primary. They had ballots. They filled out circles. They went to the voting booths. They spent money on advertisements.

Micah Loewinger: Stephen Miller, Project 2025 author and former Trump staffer on Fox News this week.

Stephen Miller: As President Trump said, the Republican Party spent tens of millions of dollars running against Joe Biden.

Micah Loewinger: In this one sound bite, Miller captured the current panic and rage in Trump world. None of this was supposed to happen. The GOP machinery, including its partisan boosters in the right-wing press, have had to abruptly switch gears and focus on a candidate they've spent much less time attacking.

Kat Abughazaleh: When it comes to Kamala Harris, it feels like right-wing media has been remarkably shortsighted.

Micah Loewinger: Kat Abughazaleh, also known as Kat Abu online, in a video she made for Mother Jones about the smears against Harris.

Kat Abughazaleh: By not hitting her seriously over the last four years, the national electorate isn't primed to turn against her with Pavlovian ease.

Micah Loewinger: I called up Kat Abu, who monitors conservative outlets to understand how Fox and the like have been talking about the vice president.

Kat Abughazaleh: Bill O'Reilly has called her the most radical abortion person the country has ever seen.

Bill O'Reilly: The most extreme politician ever elected to public office in America on abortion.

Micah Loewinger: There's been a whole lot of this line.

Bill O'Reilly: A San Francisco liberal.

News clip: California socialist.

Kat Abughazaleh: She's a California liberal.

News clip: Coming from San Francisco.

Bill O'Reilly: She wants to ban plastic straws. I love my plastic straw. I hate those paper straws.

Kat Abughazaleh: I've seen people call her a bimbo.

Jeanine Pirro: This bimbo literally starts cackling and laughing. It is a sad commentary on the highest-ranking woman in the United States.

Kat Abughazaleh: The insult that has been Fox's and the right's favorite for the past four years is insulting Kamala Harris's laugh. Sean Hannity has so many supercuts of Kamala Harris's laugh. The other day he said.

Sean Hannity: There's just one reason that voters seem to detest Kamala Harris. You decide.

[laughter]

Kat Abughazaleh: It was just 30 seconds of different clips of her laughing. That was it. There was nothing else.

Micah Loewinger: How were Republicans speaking about Harris before she was a contender in this election?

Kat Abughazaleh: It was basically the same. That's the craziest part, is they could have spent the last four years creating an actual case against her if they thought she was going to be an actual candidate. Instead, they spent the last four years condescending and making fun of her because, I guess, they thought it would goose ratings or make them feel like big men. Now, they don't have the infrastructure they need to have successful attacks right out of the gate.

Micah Loewinger: You may be wondering why Fox hasn't yet portrayed Kamala Harris as pure evil as they did with Hillary Clinton. Kat Abu says conservative media tend to categorize women in one of two ways.

Kat Abughazaleh: Women they don't want to sleep with and women they want to sleep with, but never will. Hillary Clinton was not sexual to them, and Kamala Harris is. With Hillary Clinton, they spent 30 years painting this image of this lady dragon that's a huge bitch, a huge nag, she drinks baby blood. Her husband had to cheat on her because he had to get away from her. That infrastructure really helped that 30 years of attacks or 20 years of attacks. Then you have your Kamala Harris.

Micah Loewinger: Who gets this treatment from pundits on Fox and Newsmax.

Greg Kelly: We hooked up after a Halloween party.

?Speaker: The blackface paid off.

Greg Kelly: [chuckles] Yes. Unfortunately, as soon as my pants came off, she realized it was all makeup.

[laughter]

Kat Abughazaleh: I think Greg Kelly is probably the weirdest person with Kamala Harris.

Greg Kelly: She just wants to flaunt it, and I think she wants to flirt a little bit.

Kat Abughazaleh: She's more ineffective than evil.

Micah Loewinger: Total diva.

Alec Lace: Kamala Harris, she's the original "Hawk Tuah" girl. That's the way she got where she is.

Kat Abughazaleh: A lot of the sexualized language around Kamala Harris is about her past relationships, particularly with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. She has been accused of sleeping with him to get higher in her political and legal career.

Megyn Kelly: I will not be shamed out of discussing this by people who say it's slut shaming or it's not relevant. It is relevant when a young candidate tries to sleep her way into politics and into power.

Kat Abughazaleh: This was 20 years ago, and Willie Brown came out with an op-ed and he said, "I've been peppered with calls to the national media about my "relationship with Kamala Harris." Most of them I've not returned. Yes, we dated. It was more than 20 years ago. Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two-state commissions when I was Assembly speaker." Then he follows it by saying, "I certainly helped her with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco. I have also helped the careers of Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Diane Feinstein, and a host of other politicians because that's what you do when you're a prominent politician in any state. That doesn't mean that they're going to stop bringing this up, but the language around, it is really gross. I can't remember who it was exactly, but a guest on Tucker once called her Willie Brown's bratwurst bun.

Jesse Kelly: She cackles like a dead hyena every time she's asked an uncomfortable question. It's the same reason she started out her political career as Willie Brown's bratwurst bun. Kamala Harris will do anything to get ahead.

Michael Loewinger: During Obama's candidacy and then presidency, Trump pioneered the racist birther conspiracy theory, and we heard similar lies about Harris back in 2020, that she was not really a US citizen, and therefore, was not eligible to be president.

Donald Trump: I heard it today that she doesn't meet the requirements, and by the way, the lawyer that wrote that piece is a very highly qualified, very talented lawyer.

Michael Loewinger: To what extent have you seen this birther conspiracy theory make a comeback since she announced her latest run?

Kat Abughazaleh: There have been people that are talking about it, but for the most part, they're cranks. I don't think it's going to have an actual effect on this election. I don't think Kamala Harris is going to have to show her birth certificate. I doubt it's going to be a part of this election.

Michael Loewinger: Instead of explicit racism, Kat Abu says she's noticed politicians and pundits deploy a number of coded attacks.

Donald Trump: There was nobody nastier than her. She played the race guard at a level that you rarely see.

Michael Loewinger: Others are mostly sticking with the dog whistle du jour.

News clip: She is a DEI.

News clip: She was a DEI hire.

Tim Burchett: One hundred percent, she was a DEI hire.

Kellyanne Conway: She does not speak well, she does not work hard, she doesn't inspire anyone, and she should not be the standard-bearer for the party.

Mike Johnson: Listen, this election, as I noted at the outset, is going to be about policies, not personalities.

Michael Loewinger: House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday told his colleagues to cool it with the DEI stuff.

Mike Johnson: This is not personal with regard to Kamala Harris, and her ethnicity or her gender had nothing to do with this whatsoever.

Michael Loewinger: Part of the problem here seems to be that the Republican party wants to be more attractive to Black voters, to female voters.

Kat Abughazaleh: Oh, that's definitely the problem. Misogyny and especially misogyny against Black women, it's still extremely pervasive in this country, and especially on the Right, there have been some valid criticisms of Kamala Harris' record as an AG. She's been criticized for things that her or her office did, her truancy program that shield parents for truant children, but because the Right doesn't care about those things, they don't care about getting nonviolent drug offenders out of prison. Because of that, they don't have attacks with substance.

Kat Abughazaleh: I do want to say that there is a caveat. This is all pointing out how unprepared the Right has been, because they don't have anything in the chamber besides, "She's Black, she's a woman, and she laughs a lot." That doesn't mean that it's going to stay that way for the rest of this election cycle. Harris has been remarkably careful to stay away from any tabloid scandals. They have to create an actual villain with at least some type of substance, and to build that entirely on her race and gender, I'm not sure if it's enough, but you know, maybe in America, it is.

Michael Loewinger: Kat, thank you very much.

Kat Abughazaleh: Thank you for having me.

Michael Loewinger: Kat Abughazaleh is a contributor to Zeteo and a video creator at Mother Jones.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, evidence suggests that Kamala Harris is radically, I mean, extreme in moderation.

Michael Loewinger: This is On the Media.

[music]

Michael Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. About a week into Kamala Harris's new status as the presumptive Democratic nominee, her relationship with the mainstream press is still finding its footing. Harris has spent nearly the last four years in the dark, airless pit of the vice presidency, a place we came to know through the HBO show Veep. Trending again right now for its apparent clairvoyance.

[show clips]

TV clip: POTUS is not gonna be running for a second term.

TV clip: Oh, my God!

TV clip: I'm gonna run.

TV clip: Whoa, whoa! Ma'am, give me the straight poop here. Is this for real?

TV clip: It's totally for real.

TV clip: Oh, thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you. Can we make it public?

TV clip: No, no, no, no, no, no. We got to wait for POTUS to make a statement. POTUS, he knew the gig was up because Doyle, Furlong, Chung all turned the party against him. I mean, it was just, you know, RIP-OTUS.

Brooke Gladstone: As she now emerges under a searing spotlight, we turn to someone who's had many years on the Kamala Harris beat. Jamilah King is an editorial director at Mother Jones, and like Harris, a Bay Area native. It was in the 2000s that King working as an editor for a youth publication, encountered then-District Attorney Harris through the latter's Back on Track program. That was an initiative aimed to lower recidivism among young people charged with low-level nonviolent drug offenses.

Brooke Gladstone: King would follow, and later formally report on Harris for years. Even in those early days, she saw Harris as a reflection of a lot of identities that are hard to define or effectively cover. Starting even with the basics, being a Democrat in San Francisco.

Jamilah King: San Francisco is a very, very liberal city, but there do exist clashes between different communities, and particularly between a more moderate Black community and a more progressive white wing of liberal politics.

Brooke Gladstone: Just to clarify, the Black community speaking very broadly was actually more centrist than the white liberals.

Jamilah King: Yes, I think that's safe to say historically in San Francisco. It's a weird dynamic the way that it plays out. By and large, the Black community in San Francisco is more working class, more supportive of government services, and more in need of them. On the ground, service-oriented programs were more important than let's defund the police. Not to say that those things didn't take root, but I think it was a bit more complicated.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm wondering about this famous article that Lara Bazelon wrote in The New York Times, an op-ed back in 2019, "Kamala Harris was not a progressive prosecutor." Bazelon claimed that she started out as one, but later became definitively centrist and pushing for some wrongful convictions, gave fodder for anti-Harris arguments on both the far Right and the far Left.

Jamilah King: Lara Bazelon is absolutely correct. Kamala Harris was not a progressive prosecutor, but one of her first big moments as District Attorney of San Francisco was declining to pursue the death penalty against a man who had killed a police officer. This was early on relatively speaking in the crusade and the death penalty. Though it may have been a perfectly acceptable position in most progressive circles within the context of San Francisco, and specifically the police union, the cops, it was unforgivable.

Jamilah King: At the time, Dianne Feinstein spoke out against Kamala's decision to not pursue the death penalty. I think that was really formative for her because she'd taken a stand and the backlash was not just immediate. It was pretty prolonged. When she ran for Attorney General, she actually had a really difficult time with the police, and so she made this political calculation to move her platform to the center. Another way to look at it is Kamala Harris is not an activist.

Brooke Gladstone: Her parents were activists.

Jamilah King: In fact, they were pretty upset when she decided to become a prosecutor of all things. She had to make the case to her parents. She has a personal story about a friend who disclosed to her that she was being molested, and Kamala Harris invited her to live at her home and that pushed her down the lane of becoming a prosecutor, but a progressive prosecutor, she was not.

Jamilah King: First of all, that language wasn't really prevalent in the 1980s. You're dealing with the drug war, you're dealing with crack cocaine flooding Black communities and so there was, I think a lot of pressure to enforce the law. Right now, she's trying to position herself as the person to prosecute the case against Donald Trump.

Jamilah King: It's a love-hate relationship. When we see her interrogating Jeff Sessions and Brett Kavanaugh in Senate confirmation hearings, we applaud that prosecutorial instinct. We applaud those skills but then when you step back and you're like, "Wait a minute, what is a prosecutor's actual job? Should we be applauding this?" It's a little bit different.

Brooke Gladstone: In terms of the implications for her career aspirations now, for someone on the left, she's a cop. Someone who'd impeded the legalization of marijuana stayed pretty quiet during the rise of Black Lives Matter in 2014, developed a program that would be fine. In a few cases, jail parents whose kids missed school.

Jamilah King: In 2021, you wrote in the wake of Black Lives Matter's presence in the 2020 campaign, you wrote, "On paper, Harris should have been a prime candidate to unequivocally become the face of such efforts. Her origin story starts with parents who met while protesting in the streets of Berkeley during the Civil Rights Movement. In college, she joined a prominent Black sorority with a focus on community service and protested against apartheid in South Africa, but a career in law enforcement seemed to have clipped the wings of any radicalism that might have been there in the first place. Is that still true?

Jamilah King: Yes. I think her concessions in that regard are what's made it possible for her to now be running for president and get the endorsement of Joe Biden. She's learned to play this political game, and while some people say that she hasn't been great at it, I'd argue that she's now running for president, so she can't be too bad. She is and has been always a moderate Democrat who has found ways to work within the system. That's something that you hear again and again when you look into her story. She counsels young people. You can be banging on the door, trying to get into the halls of power, or you can be at the table. I think that's as much a testament to her generation than it is to her political beliefs, but she's very much a person who wants to be at the table where the decisions are made. She's not going to flip the table over. She's going to try to sit at the head of it.

Brooke Gladstone: Obviously, after her 2020 campaign stalled, she did rise to the role of vice president. What do you make of the coverage she's received over the past four years?

Jamilah King: It's been rough. Whether it is the first interview early on with Lester Holt, that didn't go well.

Brooke Gladstone: What was wrong with that interview?

Jamilah King: She was off our game. I think even her office will say that.

Lester Holt: Do you have any plans to visit the border?

VP Kamala Harris: I'm here in Guatemala today. At some point, we are going to the border. We've been to the border. This whole thing about the border, we've been to the border. We've been to the border.

Lester Holt: You haven't been to the border.

VP Kamala Harris: And I haven’t been to Europe. I don't understand the point that you're making. I'm not discounting the importance of the border.

Lester Holt: I mentioned it because you've been [crosstalk]

Jamilah King: After that interview went so poorly, she disappeared from the public for a while, and that really didn't do her any favors because it just led to this perception that she wasn't doing anything. She wasn't effective.

Brooke Gladstone: To the point where two profiles of her last October, one from The New York Times was titled "In Search of Kamala Harris," and the one from The Atlantic, "The Kamala Harris Problem." Why did she feel the need to disappear?

Jamilah King: Her office has had a lot of turnover, and so she has very few people around her who have been with her for a long time. I think there's also her outsider status. Up until 2017, we're talking about someone whose career existed entirely in California, which while it is a big state, it's a blue state, 3,000 miles away from the power of Washington, DC.

Jamilah King: Even though she was Vice President, and historically, our Vice Presidents have been people who have a wealth of experience on Capitol Hill to sort of be the movers and shakers behind the scenes, she didn't necessarily have those connections. She's been the butt of a lot of jokes, whether it's her laugh, the type of cookware she buys, and what folks have called her word salad. The fact that she'll go on these tangents or end up talking in circles, and she was put in a position where she was investigating the root causes of immigration, a major undertaking.

Brooke Gladstone: As a result, the far-right media dubbed her the “border czar.”

Nikki Haley: Kamala had one job. One job. And that was to fix the border. Now imagine her in charge of the entire country.

Jamilah King: My colleague at Mother Jones, Isabela Dias, wrote a great piece on this called "The Myth of Kamala Harris as Border Czar," and looks at specifically what Harris was tasked on working on. When she went to Central America, she was looking into government corruption, leveraging public and private sectors to try to create jobs, trying to improve food security in the region. She was never going to fix the immigration problem. I don't think that was ever even the goal, but I think one very successful tactic of the right was to pin the border crisis on her as someone who in the administration was ostensibly responsible for tackling it.

Brooke Gladstone: When she accepted the nomination for Vice President back in 2020, you noted that her speech was actually unusually personal, a little out of character, given that she's "more comfortable discussing the finer points of proposed policy instead of the human side of it." You say she's always been reticent about sharing personal anecdotes or her views on morality, and rarely goes there, but of course, we voters like to know or like to believe we know how our presidents think.

Jamilah King: She is someone who really doesn't like to talk about her personal story, her family history. Yet the enduring image that we have of her from the 2020 presidential election is her saying, "I'm that girl."

VP Kamala Harris: There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me.

Jamilah King: It's a learning curve for her. She's getting more comfortable talking about herself. She is now in positions that require it. When you are in local office or even statewide office, it's an advantage for you to talk about the facts, the numbers, the percentage points that you should improve things. The presidency is very much modeling the country's aspirations, and she definitely has her work cut out for her.

Brooke Gladstone: She's compared sometimes with Obama. Sometimes that comparison is attributed to the late journalist, Gwen Ifill, who once called Harris a female Barack Obama, but she doesn't have his literary gifts, nor does she have the desire to speak with the kind of poetry that was often attributed to Obama.

Jamilah King: Kamala Harris is not a poet. She's a policymaker, and it's much more difficult for a woman to talk about her personal story, to talk about her personal narrative, her dreams, her hopes, her fears, her aspirations without being labeled a certain way, without being told that she's getting ahead of herself.

Brooke Gladstone: We don't want her to cry for goodness sake.

Jamilah King: We want her to be laughing, but even her laughing is a problem. I've heard from a lot of people who've spent a lot of time with her that she's actually incredibly warm and gregarious and funny and profane even when she's talking to folks one-on-one. I think there is a little bit of the residual Hillary Clinton problem. When you look at Kamala Harris and you look at Hillary Clinton, you see a lot of similarities in how they're portrayed in the press, how powerful women are talked about in the press. Now, a lot of that is changing the fact that she's going to have access to this huge Democratic Party apparatus of the presidential campaign, but she's also a deeply private person.

Jamilah King: There's still things that her staff and the country are learning about her as a person that maybe she hasn't even thought to share because her mind is so analytical and not lyrical in the ways that we've come to expect from Barack Obama.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you think given her past relationship with the press that she can meet this political moment?

Jamilah King: Look, I think if she leans into who she is instead of who she's trying to be or who she thinks Americans want her to be, she'll find that she has a lot more support and that there are so many more people who have similar stories to hers. For most of her career, she was a single woman who did not have any biological children. I think we can go back to the work of Rebecca Traister.

Brooke Gladstone: Rebecca Traister's book, All the Single Ladies discusses the 21st century phenomenon of the American single woman.

Jamilah King: That's a pretty big demographic of folks. Millennials especially are waiting longer to have children if they have them at all. There's definitely at least a conversation to be had about how the decision to have children or not have children either opens up or winnows your political ambitions and opportunities. Those are the conversations, those interpersonal conversations that are more substantive. I think she can be an avatar for a lot of difficult issues that come up in women's personal lives and the lives of people of color. I do think that she has the ability to be a little bit more open, a little bit more connected to ordinary people.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you sense a change in the wind with regard to her press these days or is this just a brief honeymoon and we just can't extrapolate from it?

Jamilah King: Look, I still think the press should look critically at her record, but in terms of how she's perceived by the press, you can tell that it's already shifting both with the funny memes that are popping up. Also, you saw this week GOP leaders issued a mandate basically not to be racist when talking about Kamala Harris.

Brooke Gladstone: This week, Tennessee Republican Tim Burchett suggested that President Joe Biden selected Harris as his running mate solely because she is Black "100%, she is a DEI hire." I think that may be the direction that we'll hear the MAGA GOP's going.

Jamilah King: I'm sure they'll find a way to rebrand the racism. They never miss an opportunity to do that, but I think what is different is the public's readiness to spot it and call it out when it does happen. I think that'll be something to look for the next three months.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you so much.

Jamilah King: Thank you, Brooke. I hope that was helpful, and big fan of the show.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Oh, thanks. Jamilah King is an editorial director at Mother Jones.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, New York Times podcaster and columnist, and maybe President Toppler, Ezra Klein.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. There were 24 days between when President Joe Biden took the debate stage in late June to when he dropped out of the race last Sunday. In those three-plus weeks, as the mainstream media circled around his health and his headspace, and Democratic leaders were calling on him to drop out, pundits were separated on what would happen if he did.

News clip: A lot of people today in the wake of last night's debate, trying to understand what exactly would happen if President Joe Biden were to step aside, how would that work, has a party replaced the presumptive nominee who would decide on the replacement?

News clip: Could you in the course of the next month have a real open mini primary with four or five candidates in town halls or debates or whatever, and go to Chicago and have an open convention?

News clip: There are three different convention options. First, the brokered convention. Second, the contested convention. Finally, the open convention.

News clip: Well, here's a chance for a fresher face to catch lightning in a bottle. A contested Democratic National Convention is nothing to fear.

Micah Loewinger: The momentum for a change at the top of the ticket picked up speed after the debate, but months before that, a lone voice was out there, just asking questions.

Ezra Klein: It is February. Fatalism this far before the election is ridiculous. Yes, it's too late to throw this to primaries, but it's not too late to do something.

Micah Loewinger: Ezra Klein, New York Times columnist, and podcast host.

Ezra Klein: So then what? Step one, unfortunately, is convincing Biden that he should not run again, that he does not want to risk being Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a heroic brilliant public servant, who causes the outcome she feared most, because she didn't retire early enough.

Micah Loewinger: Then Ezra Klein became the news.

News clip: You probably heard recently that Ezra Klein was recommending that Biden pass the torch. New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein has been advocating for what's called an open convention.

News clip: Ezra Klein came out with that piece saying, "It's not going to work. You should just resign a hero."

News clip: Michelle Cottle, with Ross Douthat and Ezra Klein. "After the Debate: I Don't Think Joe Biden Should Be Running." Biden has lost The New York Times. Let the Democrat Civil War begin.

Micah Loewinger: Ezra, welcome to the show.

Ezra Klein: Thank you for having me.

Micah Loewinger: In February of this year, you published an audio essay with the headline, "Democrats Have a Better Option than Biden." In the essay, you said that you couldn't "point to a moment where Biden faltered in his presidency because his age had slowed him," but you could point to "moments when he is faltering in his campaign for the presidency because his age is slowing him." Basically, you felt his mental acuity wasn't necessarily a problem for governing, but you did have serious doubts he could successfully campaign to a second term. When was the first moment when you said to yourself, "President Joe Biden, can't win this."

Ezra Klein: This was a process for me of coming to admit something that I knew, or at least already believed, but almost everybody I spoke to anywhere believed. I had the same experience, I think of virtually anybody who is near the Democratic Party, which is not my official role, but I'm a liberal commentator. People would just ask me all the time about Biden's age. It was a thing on their minds whenever any ordinary voters spoke to me about him. I could see him polling that for some time, 60%, 70%, 80% of the country had been saying, he is too old to be effective. I could see in polling that a plurality of Democrats had wanted him not to run again.

Ezra Lein: In 2022, I've been planning to write a piece saying the Democrats really needed to have a primary that year, because I just didn't know how Biden would be on the campaign trail. He was just quite a bit older. They just needed to test that out, but then they had a really strong midterm, which Biden took credit for, and the energy in the party that anybody would even dare challenge him evaporated.

Then I began to watch, who he doing interviews, who's behind in the polls, and he's not doing the Super Bowl interview. That's the biggest audience you'll get all year. You're not going to do the Super Bowl interview. Then that same week that that gets announced, he has the press conference about the special counsel report about his memory.

Micah Loewinger: You're referring to the report from Robert Hur, The Hur Report.

Ezra Klein: The Hur Report. In this press conference, which has only one purpose, which is to reassure people about his memory. He mixes up Mexico and Egypt, and creates the very doubts he's trying to calm. For me at that point, I was like, "I don't think that this is going to work." He's not out there performing. When he is performing, it's not working. My view was not that there was no way he would win, nobody can say that, but my view was that this was a really dangerous bet for Democrats to be making with very, very, very high stakes.

Ezra Klein: The possibility of him having some real age-related moments, falling in a bad way, getting sick during the campaign, and being off the trail for an extended period of time, given what people already thought about him. It was just a risk. I didn't think they should be running given the stakes of a second Trump presidency.

Micah Loewinger: In that essay, from February, you said that you knew a lot of liberals, a lot of Democrats are going to be furious at me for this show. What was the response to the essay? What happened?

Ezra Klein: A lot of them were furious of you for that show. The response was interesting, because the response from normie Democrats who emailed me, it was overwhelming. I've never gotten as many emails on the show, and overwhelmingly positive. People to saying, "I don't want him to run again. I love Joe Biden, but he is too old." More elite Democrats were particularly in public much angrier.

Ezra Klein: I also had the unusual experience of people who had told me privately they agreed with me, attacking the column in public. I would say about this is that parties have incentive structures. This is something that was annoying me when Biden and others were saying that what was happening against him now was an elite plot. The party elite had gone lockstep around Joe Biden.

Ezra Klein: It was very clear that if you were inside the party, which I am not, I'm independent from that, if you were inside the party, to step out against him, was very, very dangerous. Dean Phillips tried it, he had been made into a laughingstock for doing so. You weren't going to get people doing this, because even if they agreed that Biden was a very risky bet for reelection, so long as he was the party's only realistic option, there was no serious alternative to him, to say anything against him was only to weaken him and to make Donald Trump likelier.

Ezra Klein: In my view, and I said this in that essay was that this was fatalism. Too many people I knew in the Democratic Party at high levels, were saying privately what I was saying, but they weren't saying it publicly because they believed it was too late. There hadn't been a primary and now there was nothing that could be done. To me, the role I was playing was familiarizing people with the idea that it wasn't Biden or bust, that there were a good number of other possibilities if they wanted to take them.

Micah Loewinger: You've used this term elite. In this populist rhetoric age that we're in, it is a very broad catch-all, but what exactly do you mean when you use it?

Ezra Klein: Yes. When I say party elites, I mean it in the political science sense of the term, which is vague. Political parties in America are very diffuse organizations. The people who are officially part of them, the chair of the Democratic National Committee is Jaime Harrison and the leader of the Senate Democrats is Chuck Schumer, and in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, but then you have this vast assemblage like union officials, activists, donors, people in the media who are listened to by people in that party.

Ezra Klein: Rachel Maddow is absolutely like an elite within the Democratic Party. She is not a member in an organizational way of the Democratic Party, but she is one of the most influential people to Democrats in the country. That's how I think about elites. It's a disorganized mass of people with influence over others to try to coordinate and also work around each other depending on the situation.

Micah Loewinger: On our show in February, and earlier, we acknowledged the polling on Biden's age and the unpopularity of his rematch with Trump, but we were also critical of how the onslaught of coverage about Biden's age seemed to completely eclipse the policy stakes of the race. It became the one thing we were talking about. Maybe it was the right thing to talk about, but were there any examples of coverage about Biden's age that you felt went too far? Or do you think the pylon was appropriate?

Ezra Klein: You know, I'm only really going to speak for my own coverage. I think I do a lot of coverage of policy stakes of the race. I've done a lot of that coverage this year. One of the problems to me was that the policy stakes of the race were being overshadowed in voters' minds by an upstream question, which is competence for the job.

Ezra Klein: I do not believe there has been insufficient coverage of policy this year, but I think there has often been a tendency to shut down conversation about Joe Biden by saying, "Just focus on Donald Trump. Just focus on how bad Donald Trump is." That's not how voters think. That is how hardcore Democrats think, but voters, they want an actual choice of candidate they think can do the job well, and they deserve them. That is the job of political parties to put up candidates who can be a strong vessel for their policy agendas. If you have a candidate who's not a strong vessel for the policy agenda, then, yes, your policy agenda's going to have trouble breaking through or seem credible to people.

Micah Loewinger: There were points after your essay when Biden seemed to have a strong public performance or at least a competent one. I'm thinking of the State of the Union address, for example. Did you ever doubt your position after you put it out there?

Ezra Klein: Yes, when the State of the Union happened, I had not seen Joe Biden looking like that for a long time. I thought, if he shows up like that, my position is going to look ridiculous. I said as much in a column, but I did a show around the State of the Union and it was an ask me anything with my editor and he's like, okay, do you have to put on the hair shirt now? Were you totally wrong? You know what I said, which I believed was, I don't know what separates Joe Biden's good days from his bad days. I don't know why he seems so radically different in some appearances from others, but I think it is still a tricky bet that over the many months from here to the election, that he's not going to have bad days at a bad time.

Ezra Klein: If he doesn't, wonderful. Nothing would be better from my perspective. I like Joe Biden. I think he's got a great record. I am a really big fan of a lot of legislation he's passed. From my perspective, if it turns out he can campaign the way he did at the State of the Union every day from there until November and beat Donald Trump by four points, terrific. That's great. I'm happy to be wrong, but if not, then Democrats are going to need to still have these other options in their pocket.

Micah Loewinger: Of course, the conversation radically changed after his debate with Trump, and I saw some memes going around online people saying stuff like, some of you owe Ezra Klein an apology. Did you hear from people who had changed their minds following his debate performance?

Ezra Klein: I did, but this is just not about me or some column I wrote. This was a difficult thing, like a sad thing for the party. Joe Biden is a good man. He's done a good job. Age, and its diminishments will come for us all, I guess, if we're lucky. My view on this was always that it was a risk calculation. When I was having these conversations, the most common thing everybody inside the Democratic Party would say to me was that Kamala Harris was too weak to be the candidate. That was the thing they couldn't get over. They would agree with me about Biden, but they'd say, we don't really have another option because this open convention is a fantasy, and Harris is weak. She will be the nominee, and she's going to be weak.

Ezra Klein: Now Harris is here, and Harris is strong. My view is that the Democratic Party needed information that would only get through opening this up. When it did open it up, and I would say this was actually true ever since the night of the debate. Harris just ran away with it. I think she's been functionally flawless.

Micah Loewinger: You said that she walked the line between supporting Biden 100% while subtly making the case that she could replace him.

Ezra Klein: Yes. To be fair, a number of people were doing this. I think if you were watching what people like Gavin Newsom were doing, what a lot of the surrogates were doing, it was to be out there saying, of course, Joe Biden is going to be our nominee. Under no circumstances is the party going to change course, and then showing that they can make the kind of aggressive, clear, inspiring arguments he could not.

Gavin Newsom: We've got to have the back of this president. You don't turn your back because of one performance. What kind of party does that? It's been a masterclass, 15.6 million jobs. That's eight times more than the last three Republican presidents combined. The only thing the last three Republican presidents have in common is recessions.

Ezra Klein: It was a double game being played by many in the party, and one thing I appreciated about Harris during this period, was compared to some of the others, she didn't deny what people had seen, and she didn't try to talk them out of it, and she didn't fall into a place of lying or of telling them that they shouldn't be talking about this stuff because it wasn't good for the party. She admitted it, then she said, but there are other things that are more important here. She would turn the conversation to Joe Biden's record towards Donald Trump's lying.

VP Kamala Harris: Listen. People can debate on style points, but ultimately this election and who is the president of the United States has to be about substance, and the contrast is clear. Look at what happened during the course of the debate. Donald Trump lied over and over and over again as he has want to do.

Ezra Klein: I just thought every single appearance she made starting that night on CNN was virtually perfect.

Micah Loewinger: We're going to come back to Kamala Harris, but first I want to talk about some of the narratives we've heard about who was responsible for Biden stepping down. There have been accusations from different sides of the political spectrum that the media forced Biden out. In July, the polemical journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted that, "Dem billionaires, their media allies and their DC puppets are forcing the sitting president and elected Dem nominee out of the race."

Micah Loewinger: Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis wrote that The New York Times "violated the journalistic norms they claim to uphold in their vindictive campaign against Biden. They hounded him out of office." Just this Monday, Greg Gutfeld on Fox was saying, "Didn't we just witness a coup orchestrated by Obama, Clooney, the big coastal donors, and the media who just replaced a candidate simply because he was polling below Trump?"

Micah Loewinger: If we kind of put some of the partisan tone aside and just acknowledge that there was a string of leaks to The New York Times of high-profile Democrats seemingly in unison, calling on Joe Biden to drop out, do you think there's anything to the narrative that the media is responsible for this?

Ezra Klein: I think there are two separate. I would call them conspiracy theories, but maybe that's a little bit too harsh, but two separate theories of elite malfeasance that have propagated here. One is that there was a huge coverup around Joe Biden, which I don't think is true. If the people around Joe Biden didn't think he was up to the job of debating Donald Trump, they would've not negotiated an early June debate. On the other side, the idea that this was some kind of media or elite conspiracy, again, as somebody who was, I think quite early on writing this, I can tell you that I didn't feel a bunch of supportive conspirators coming towards me. People are really pissed at me.

Ezra Klein: What happened after the debate it's like a financial crisis. A financial crisis is when we have a major asset class that people think is worth one thing, and it's not. There is a shattering of the information upon which people were telling all of their stories and making all their strategic decisions. The debate followed by his interviews and also very importantly followed by the calls he did with members of Congress, was a shattering of the information structure around Joe Biden and the parties now in chaos. The idea that the media wouldn't aggressively cover that, that wouldn't be the biggest story in the world, just seems very strange to me.

Micah Loewinger: I know you said you don't want to make this about you, but I do have to ask, what do you say to listeners who believe that you played an instrumental role in unseating a presidential candidate?

Ezra Klein: I don't really think that I did. Look, if Joe Biden had not shown up at the debate the way he did, he would've been just fine. I think I prepared people, maybe if I did anything to admit something that voters already overwhelmingly said was true. It was the elites who were late to this view, and I was late to this view compared to the vast majority of voters, and then reality made it impossible to ignore for Democrats, and from there, the Democratic Party, in a way that I think is very admirable, began acting. I can tell you after I wrote that series of pieces in February, nobody was moving to get Joe Biden off the ticket. Nobody was moving to push Joe Biden out. What happened was reality forced the Democratic Party to take seriously what the voters were already telling it.

Micah Loewinger: You've talked a lot about lessons for the Democratic Party. What do you think are the lessons here for the press? What do you think this story reveals about journalism and Washington? What do you think reporters inside the Beltway should do differently from now on?

Ezra Klein: This should maybe be a lesson not just to the press, because I think this is true for people inside the party, it's true for everybody, but we have watched things that people felt were impossible become possible very quickly, and the stories we tell about what can and cannot happen in American politics are very narrow. I can't tell you how many people said there's no way Joe Biden can be replaced on the ticket, but of course, there was, and I would say this, has actually been true about Harris too. For all the conversations I had about Harris in this period, and I had a lot of them, nobody said to me, you know, she may be actually an incredible candidate.

Ezra Klein: She may be somebody who the country, or at least half of the country thrills to from the first moments, they can actually imagine her leading the ticket, and in the role, Donald Trump seemed impossible at one point. A lot of this, Lord knows I didn't predict it. I would've also never predicted that the political weight of the assassination attempt on Trump would've faded as rapidly as it has. I think the lesson here is humility. We don't really know how people will respond to things, and we don't really know what is actually possible, and we keep getting surprised, and we should take that surprise very seriously.

Micah Loewinger: Ezra, thank you very much.

Ezra Klein: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Ezra Klein is a columnist at The New York Times. He's the host of the podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, and author of the book Why We're Polarized.

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That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang, with help from Pamela Appea.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer, and Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone, and I am so happy to report that I have an official co-host finally. Congrats, Micah.

Micah Loewinger: Thanks, Brooke. It feels great to be official. Long live OTM. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: You said it.

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