Who Is the Real Base of the Democratic Party?
NEWS | 30 April 2026
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. David examines the role of the dinner in an administration that rejects the basic concepts of honesty with and respect toward independent media. During previous administrations, there was some norm of good faith between the White House and the press. But now, as the president systematically misleads the media and is openly hostile to the press, David asks what the point of this night of pretended common purpose is. Then, David is joined by Jamal Simmons, a host of the Trailblaze podcast and a former communications director for Kamala Harris, for a wide-ranging conversation about the state of the Democratic Party. David and Simmons discuss Harris’s profile among her party’s constituents, how much the online left should dictate Democratic policy, what happened in 2024, and what Democrats should do in 2028. Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of The Magician, by Colm Tóibín. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Jamal Simmons, a former communications director for Vice President Kamala Harris and host of the Trailblaze podcast. The book I will discuss this week is The Magician, by Colm Tóibín, a reconstruction of the life of the German writer Thomas Mann. But before either the dialogue or the book, some thoughts on the shocking attack on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this past weekend. The facts of this attack are still coming to light. There is an apprehended suspect. We will know more about this, and I won’t comment directly on what happened or on why it might have happened. I wanna think more deeply instead about the dinner itself, the event that was interrupted and shadowed by this attack. As long as the White House [Correspondents’] Dinner has been going on—or at least as long as I’ve been conscious of it—it’s been a much-criticized event. There is something that strikes some people as odd about the press corps and the administration of the day, plus business leaders plus Hollywood movie stars, putting on glad clothes—black tie, long dresses—and mingling together in a display of camaraderie. In the past, I didn’t object to this as much as some did because when Washington is working properly, as it has done in the past, the relationship between the White House and the media is not exactly adversarial and not as adversarial as some would have it. It’s a kind of competitive interdependence. The media and the administration of the day have different ends, but they both are there to serve the American people and a global audience too. And they both need each other: The administration needs the media to get its message out; the media needs the administration because that’s how it gets information to distribute. And [there] also has been in the past a basic agreement of some norms, values, and standards: The administration respects the constitutionally protected role of the press, and the press can and does and should, most of the time, take for granted that the administration is motivated by some vision of the public good and that most of what it says, with proper checking, can be taken for granted as issued—if not in literal truth, then at least in something like good faith. But all of those assumptions really have broken down in the Trump years and especially in the second Trump term. And there is a deep question to be asked about what on earth we are doing maintaining an illusion of common purposes when those clearly have dissolved. This administration is not just one that is, in general, authoritarian; it is engaged in a series of very specific shakedowns of media institutions. Millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars extracted from media companies, the parent corporations of television networks—all of these have been shaken down and extracted from by this administration. This is a relationship where you’re not in that kind of competitive interdependence that I’ve described, but you really are in a truly not only adversarial, but even inimical relationship. But there’s something else that is a problem, which is that presumption of good faith, that presumption that the reason that the White House and the press talk back and forth is because they need to share information back and forth—the White House has things it wants people to hear; the press has things it needs to learn—and there is a presumption that all of this relates in some important way to reality, that has broken down, never more dramatically than in the way that the Iran war is being conducted and trying to be led to some kind of peace. Let me start with a story from April 21. And it, I think, casts some light on what is going seriously wrong in the relationship between the basic truth-telling mission of the press and the reality-denying attitudes of the Trump administration. So here’s a quote from CNBC, an important financial network. Here’s the headline, April 21: “Trump tells CNBC he expects U.S. to make ‘great deal’ with Iran.” “Key points”—this is CNBC’s words—“President Trump says he thinks the U.S. is ‘going to end up with a great deal’ with Iran to end the war. Trump said he does not expect he will extend a ceasefire with Iran, which he has said will expire Wednesday.” In fact, Trump extended the cease-fire. Now, what are you doing sitting down for interviews with people who say the cease-fire won’t be extended the next day when they intend to extend the cease-fire the next day? (Laughs.) And what are you doing breaking bread with them and hobnobbing with them as if your relationship with them were of some kind of co-participants in a shared enterprise? Trump puts out media messages not in order to inform the public and not even in order to deceive the Iranians, but to realize some kind of vision of himself as master of events that he’s clearly lost control of. And when you act with him like a co-author, you are acquiescing in a relationship that is not serving your customers and readers and viewers, but actively disserving them. The information coming out from this White House is intended systematically to mislead for Trump’s own psychological and political needs. Again, you have to talk to them; there’s no way to avoid it. What the president says is news. But when you’re dealing with a president lying to you again and again about such basic things as, There won’t be a cease-fire tomorrow; yes, there will be a cease-fire tomorrow, you have to say this is not like the way the tech press covers Apple. It’s not the way reporters cover city hall. It’s more like covering some kind of dishonest enterprise, something you must be systematically suspicious of, something where the people you’re dealing with are there not as sources, but as kind of misleaders. And while you can have many kind of relationships with them, I wouldn’t put on a tuxedo and break bread with them and dance with [them]. We are heading into some difficult economic times. I talked about that last week with Adam Posen, when we talked about the world being on the brink of a global economic recession. Before the war, the world used 105 million barrels of oil a day. There’s now about 13 to 14 million barrels missing from the world’s output, blocked up by the Iranian blockade that President Trump keeps telling us is about to be lifted at any moment. The world is making up that 13 or 14 million shortfall by drawing on stocks, but sooner or later, it’s going to bite, and it’s going to be dark—maybe quite literally dark, as we turn off heating and turn off lighting to conserve energy—because of a war that was not thought through from the beginning. I don’t know that it serves any media company’s interest to have an image of itself dancing, laughing, breaking bread, listening to the jokes, clapping or applauding as the president says whatever it was that President Trump had in mind to say. That particular spectacle was cut short by a gunman’s crime. But for that gunman, every attendee would’ve been in a kind of bad-faith relationship with a president whose basic existence, whose daily operations are so inimical to every value that the press stands for. I don’t know whether we’re ever going to get back to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as it was. But I think we need to accept that when you bust a norm, the norm is busted. When you break a relationship, the relationship is broken. And however much we yearn for a different time, we live in these times. That’s the theme of the book I’m talking about this week, The Magician, of what it is like to be lifted out of one set of circumstances in which you are comfortable and have to confront another in which you are not. But we’re living in new kinds of circumstances, and old institutions are not serving us, and keeping them alive is just mummifying them, not preserving them. And now my dialogue with Jamal Simmons. [Music] Frum: Jamal Simmons is co-host of Trailblaze, a new podcast about the 2028 campaign cycle. From 2021 to 2023, he served as communications director for Vice President Kamala Harris. Born in Detroit, he studied at Morehouse College, then earned a master-in-public-policy degree from Harvard University’s Kennedy School. Jamal Simmons worked on the Clinton-Gore and Obama campaigns, and also for private-sector communications companies. You have seen him often on MSNBC and CNN. He is now a regular contributor to CNN. Jamal, welcome to the program. Jamal Simmons: Thanks for having me, David. Good to be here. Frum: For the record and so everyone understands this, do you have any continuing relationship with the Harris candidacy, campaign—whatever she’s got? Simmons: I don’t. I don’t advise them anymore, although I do talk to my friends very often. Frum: Okay. But you are speaking here for yourself? Simmons: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Frum: Okay, so here’s the question I wanted to pose to you, with your experience in so many campaigns, now as a podcaster, but also someone in electoral politics. There seems to be a big mismatch between what we might call podcast America—or Democratic, liberal podcast America—and how they see the American electorate, and how electoral America sees the American electorate. And I’ve got two data points, which is more than enough for generalization here. One is that former Vice President Harris went to Al Sharpton’s big annual political convention that attracts a lot of African American leaders, but not only them, and she got this rapturous response, apparently, reportedly a bigger response than any other attendee. And she’s also had this astonishing book tour in which she has sold an enormous number of books and, again, had big receptions everywhere she goes—not typical for a defeated candidate. But meanwhile, in sort of the part of America where we talk a lot about politics, and especially where liberal-minded and Democratic-minded people talk a lot about politics, she seems to be invisible, a nonfactor. How do we make sense of this seeming contrast? Simmons: So Kamala Harris is an icon. There are people in America who really see her as someone they want to be respected. They wanna make sure she’s heralded for her accomplishments. They want her to be taken seriously in any future endeavors that she may choose to pursue. They wanna hear her story because they know her story is pretty phenomenal. That matters to people. That does not mean, however, they want her to run for president again. And I think that is the mental seam that exists between her popularity and her possibility at running for president again. So if she wants to run, she’s gonna have to earn that in the same way everybody out there running is earning their candidacy. And Democrats haven’t done very well by people who’ve run for president before and lost, so that’s something that she really needs to take into account. Frum: Republicans tend to get second chances—Richard Nixon, Donald Trump—but Democrats tend not to get second chances. Simmons: They do not. If you think about it, Joe Biden was a great exception to the Democratic rule because Democrats usually don’t even nominate someone who has run for president before, let alone someone who got nominated. So the three most recent Democratic presidents were first-time candidates—Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama—until Joe Biden. But that was such an odd year. Donald Trump was a really particular figure. (Laughs.) COVID had happened, which was a very particular time. So it’s very hard for us to use 2020 as any kind of a marker for kind of how politics typically works. Frum: Was it? Because one of the things—and, again, I’m not a Democrat; I don’t come from that world—but one of the things, from an outside observer’s point of view, that seemed to happen in 2020 was that you had this enormous field of candidates, almost all of whom were crowding each other to the farthest progressive point on the left that they could crowd each other toward. And then you had Biden, who was running as the least progressive available candidate, who often didn’t seem to understand the language and issues of the ultraprogressives and sort of floated above it all, who certainly was the least online of the candidates. And there was a joke that was told that when you interviewed on the Joe Biden campaign, one of the questions you were asked was, By the way, do you have Twitter on your phone? And if you answered yes, you were told, Delete it. Simmons: (Laughs.) Frum: I don’t know if that’s literally true, but certainly, the campaign seemed to run that way. Simmons: Yeah. Frum: And the Democrats did well by nominating the least engaged, the least online, the least—seemingly—progressive of their choices. Simmons: Yeah. What they paid attention to are—there are some grounding dynamics of Democratic nomination. And one of those grounding dynamics is that African American women, in particular, tend to pick the Democratic nominee. We’ve always seen this progressive upstart candidacy, whether it was Howard Dean in 2004 or Bernie Sanders, but those people missed—other than what Barack Obama had, ’cause he was an upstart, progressive candidate, but he was able to capture African Americans, particularly African American women, in that 2008 presidential cycle, and that is a key marker. Joe Biden always had African Americans who really wanted him to win. After Donald Trump—and I’m starting to see this again for 2028—after Donald Trump, the idea of doing something unique, something groundbreaking, something that would challenge the status quo did not have a lot of appeal among core Democratic voters. They were looking for somebody who could beat Trump, beat Trumpism, and if that was an older white guy with Pennsylvania roots, if that’s what it was, they’ll take that over trying to make history. And I’m starting to see that same dynamic emerge for 2028. Frum: What do you think of this hypothesis: that one of the things that Black voters saw in Joe Biden in 2020 was an older white man who had cheerfully and gracefully served as No. 2 to a young Black man, and accepted that role in a way that others might have chaffed against, that his ability to be a gracious No. 2 in that historic role reconciled them in his turn to Biden as No. 1? Simmons: No, absolutely, that’s true. And there’s another dynamic that was typical that happened in 2020, to argue against myself for a second, which is that Democratic vice presidents almost always, at least in modern history, get nominated when they run. You saw it with Walter Mondale. You saw it with Al Gore. You saw it again, obviously, with Joe Biden. You saw it with Hubert Humphrey, right, going back to 1968. So that tends to happen when the vice presidents run. But the thing that determines whether or not you win—you can win the nomination as the vice president, but do you win the presidency? And what tends to happen—this is true with Republicans—is how popular your president was [whom] you served matters a lot to the vice president who’s trying to run, which is why you saw [Ronald] Reagan to George W. Bush. You saw Biden from Obama— Frum: H. W. Bush. Simmons: Yes, I’m sorry, from Reagan to George H. W. Bush, exactly, and then Obama to Biden. And then you know it was true, because when Biden ran, almost every sentence he uttered was about Barack Obama. (Laughs.) He always talked about being Obama’s vice president. He knew that that was a key validator for him, both with Democrats and I think also with a lot of voters who were looking to see whether or not this guy could continue what, in hindsight, was viewed to be kind of a time of normalcy and togetherness that Americans were looking for after the first Trump administration. Frum: Let me give you another hypothesis: that the way the Republican Party and the Democratic Party function is a little bit like comparing Philadelphia to Los Angeles. Simmons: (Laughs.) Frum: So Philadelphia has a downtown. Everyone can see it. Everyone knows where it is. And that downtown is surrounded by suburbs of gradually diminishing density. And everyone can see those. So evangelical Christians, that’s the Republican downtown. And everyone knows. Now, they’re not the whole of the city, but they’re downtown, they’re the base, and then everyone else fades out from the downtown. The Democratic Party is like Los Angeles. It has half a dozen downtowns, each of which believes it’s the real downtown. Simmons: (Laughs.) Frum: (Laughs.) All of which sort of bump up on the horizon. And so when you ask a question like, “Who is the Democratic base?,” right now, I think a lot of people—again, listening to the podcast traffic, looking to the way the online discussion goes—would see highly educated, urban, male-tilting, very angry and aggrieved, and somewhat downwardly economically mobile voters, those are the real downtown, and they have lost sight a little bit of the people who responded to Jim Clyburn’s endorsement in South Carolina and who made Biden the nominee in 2020, who are also a downtown. Simmons: It’s interesting. This happens every presidential cycle and every time the Democrats have to sort themselves out after a presidency: Who really is the base, right? This online base tends to be stepping up lately as that they are the ones who are really driving debate and the people have to answer to them, but the truth is, there also is—I just mentioned African American women; there also are union members who matter a lot. You still can’t really build Democratic infrastructure without the unions. They don’t have as much power as they used to, but they provide a lot of the basic—somebody’s gotta order the buses, right? (Laughs.)You gotta order buses to go pick voters up and take them to the polls. Those tend to be kind of union infrastructure endeavors. Frum: Yeah, but those aren’t different. Who are unionized people? Teachers and nurses. Simmons: Teachers, nurses, and these days, there are a lot of service organized people. Now, you do see UAW [United Auto Workers] is still one place where it’s male-dominated that tends to side with Democrats. Not the Teamsters, those tend not to be. But you see laborers and pipe fitters—you see some of these guys, and they’re split. They’re split between kind of the leadership and some of the grassroots of the union movement. But the union organizational movement still matters a lot in Democratic politics. And then, like I said, African Americans, LGBTQ, all the groups—you do all the alphabets, right, that put people together. And, yes, there is an online energy that matters. It matters a lot. It’s just we have not seen a president get nominated and win that really came from that movement without being able to build a broader coalition. Frum: Well, online people—and look, we are online people, too, now. Simmons: (Laughs.) Yes. Frum: Welcome aboard. (Laughs.) And so we’re in this. Simmons: Yeah. Frum: In the online world, intensity matters. So people can watch your podcast once. They can watch it a second time. They can come back next week and watch it one more time. It matters how often they show up. In the electoral world, intensity matters a lot less. No matter how much you like the candidate, you only get one vote, or maybe one in the primary, one in the general. So intensity doesn’t matter. And you’re often elected by people who think, Ah, don’t love her, like him less. Going with her. Grumble, grumble. Not getting there early. But still, the votes cast five minutes before closing time count just as much as the votes for which people stood in the rain for four hours before the vote. But there are people in the online world who say, If I can get people revved up—and what gets people more revved up than saying America deserved 9/11? That’ll really get them going and bring a lot of intensity. And a lot of political professionals say, Did you just volunteer to be this cycle’s Willie Horton? I think I heard you just volunteer to be this cycle’s Willie Horton. Why would you do something that dumb? And the answer is, Well, from my selfish point of view, it’s not dumb. I get a lot of validation and income from being Willie Horton. Sorry about what happens to everybody in the vicinity. Simmons: Yeah, no, the radioactive perimeter of the fallout of some of the more explosive statements that people make online does tend to blow back on Democrats. And I’ve seen this even in campaigns even before online. I was in a campaign where we brought in some pretty hotheaded speakers, and those speakers stood onstage and said really hotheaded things, and the candidate was faced with this moment of having to disavow somebody who was their supporter or get left with the fallout of what that person said. That’s happening every day now online. Frum: What did your candidate do? Simmons: He stuck by his friend, and that was a mistake. (Laughs.) That was a mistake, against advice. That was a mistake. But let me tell you: Here’s where intensity does matter. There are a lot of people who vote, and I believe this about Trump, at least the first time—I don’t know about the second time—there are a lot of people who don’t really follow politics. They’re not paying attention to all this stuff that you and I talk about. We know this. But what they do is they ask, Hey, Larry down the street or at work, you follow politics. Who are you voting for? And then if Larry is like, Oh, Donald Trump. He’s great for these five reasons. Here’s what I’m voting for, so then the person may go, Okay, well, Larry seems to like him, and Larry seems to have a good head on his shoulder. I’ll vote for Donald Trump. The same thing would happen when I was a kid. My dad was kind of that person in our neighborhood. He followed politics a lot. A lawn sign we put in front of our house would help determine people on our block. They’d literally drive up to us in the fall—we were raking leaves—and say, Hey, Larry, who are we voting for on Tuesday? (Laughs.) Right? And he’d tell ’em who we liked, and then a lot of those people would do it. So that’s the place where intensity matters. When you’re in the South or even out in the Midwest, you’ll see these huge flags and signs that are on the sides of barns or in the middle of cornfields, and so people driving by every day think, Oh, wow, everybody in this community must be for that candidate ’cause I keep seeing his sign everywhere. So in that sense, intensity matters. But you’re right—you only get one vote on Election Day, and so you gotta turn that interest into turnout, which is really a more mechanical function that parties and campaigns have to do. Frum: Can’t that Larry effect go into reverse? I’m guessing that if your neighbors turned to your dad and said, Larry, who do we like?, he was probably a pretty solid person— Simmons: Yeah. Frum: —someone in whom people had trust. Simmons: Right. Frum: But what if Larry were a notorious loudmouth and bully and jerk? Simmons: Oh, totally, right. Frum: Bernie Sanders, I think, often suffered from this. I was obviously not a Sanders supporter, but I always thought the problem with Sanders was not Sanders himself, exactly, so much as the people who liked Sanders. They were really an intolerable crew. And Sanders often suffered from the antics of people who liked him in a way that other candidates—I think there are other candidates of whom that’s true, so I don’t mean to single him out. But Trump has that problem. There are a lot of people who might have been open to a Trump support and then would look at the behavior, especially in this current cycle, of the people around him and say, I want no part of that group. Simmons: Well, actually, here’s where I’ll disagree with you a little bit. Maybe that happened in 2020, when Biden won. In 2016, when Trump ran the first time, and then in 2024, when he won the second time, I think there was that silent Trump voter. Literally, I’m thinking of a person—there’s a house that’s near where I live in the suburb and no lawn signs. The morning after Election Day, this guy put a big Trump sign in his lawn, and everybody talked about it because nobody knew a Trump voter lived there. And so there was this silent Trump effect, where people didn’t wanna be associated with it, because of all the reasons you’re talking about, but quietly, on the inside, they still went and voted for him. Frum: Well, Trump has often outperformed his poll numbers for that reason. There are a lot of people who either don’t want to admit they’re voting for Trump or who—and this is in the past; we don’t know how it is now—or who didn’t pick up the phone, just they’re alienated from the process. Simmons: Right. And they just sit quietly when you talk about Trump at the office coffee thing, and they just don’t say anything for a while, even though they know they kinda like the guy. Frum: Well, I wrote a story for The Atlantic about why Gallup withdrew from the presidential polling business, and there are a lot of conspiracy theories about it, but basically, it had become a very costly way to raise your profile, with ever-increasing risk that you are making a terrible mistake—how many calls it took in 1990 to build a statistically valid sample versus how many takes today, so it just costs much more to build statistically valid samples. And the people who don’t respond to your poll questions are not randomly distributed. The people who pick up the phone and talk to a stranger about politics are more connected, more trusting, more prosocial than the people who don’t. And if you’ve got a candidate who appeals to the less trusting and the less prosocial, the polls will systematically fail to capture that candidate’s strength. Simmons: One of the things I tell young operatives when I’ve done trainings or people come and see me for their mentor—they need a mentor, and they’re trying to figure out what to do with their life—is try to find ways to listen to strangers, right? The whole point of polling is to listen to what people are saying who don’t necessarily know what your interest is in the outcome of their point. But that is getting harder and harder to get, and now online, I’m finding this, which is: People think they’re listening to strangers. People think that they’re getting random bits of information from people. But really, they’re all existing in the same algorithmic silo, and they’re just kind of pinging each other back and forth. And so you have arguments and conversations with people about what’s happening, and they’ll tell you, No, everybody I know believes this thing. (Laughs.) Everybody I know is saying this other thing. Frum: Well, this is famously attributed to Pauline Kael, who was the film critic for The New Yorker back in the ’60s. And she is supposed to have said—and she was joking. People think she was being funny; she was joking. She said in 1968, How could Richard Nixon have won? No one I knew voted for him. Simmons: Right. (Laughs.) Frum: And being the film critic for The New Yorker, that conjures up everything you need to know right there. But that seems to happen a lot. And it happens now, yes, in the pro-Trump right, but also very much in the progressive left, where a lot of these people have convinced themselves that—from policing, to immigration, to their obsession with defaming Israel, to Gaza—that since everyone they know thinks a certain way, this is going to work. There is a fantastic book about Trump and television called Audience of One: [Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America]. And the thesis of the book is that everything in America today is cable TV. When I was young, you had, at any given moment, four, maybe five choices of what was on TV. And you typically had one TV in a house. And given that math, the goal of network executives was to find what they called “the least objectionable program.” Everybody likes zebras drinking from the pond. (Laughs.) Sunday night, when the whole family’s watching TV together, it’s zebras-at-the-pond night because no one will object to that. Simmons: Right. Frum: Then we get cable, then we get more TVs in the house, and you start producing things that are more extreme. And the thesis of the book was that Donald Trump is a classic cable-TV candidate: Those who like him like him a lot; most people don’t like him. And if there was ever the least objectionable candidate in American history, it was Biden. He was Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom right there. No one minded him that much. Simmons: (Laughs.) He was. Frum: (Laughs.) Simmons: It was his core political asset, right? (Laughs.) People thought he was a good guy who … Frum: No one minded him that much. (Laughs.) Simmons: Right. Frum: And he became unpopular in the end, but that was less personal to him and more the inherent tragedy of the human condition that we all are susceptible to. Simmons: If Biden had been healthy, Biden would’ve won that reelection. Frum: I agree with that. But also, if Biden had been healthy, there were a lot of decisions that should have been made that didn’t get made in his administration. There are a lot of moments where you had disputes between approaches and things that a more effective president would’ve been able to say, We’re doing it this way, not that way, and we’re certainly not doing both at the same time. And we’re not both talking to the press, also, and telling each other how much we hate the people who advocate the alternative approach. We have one policy, and I said it. Simmons: Yeah, and so here’s what I saw: At the time, Afghanistan was to Biden as Katrina was to Bush; it’s just that Bush didn’t have to run for reelection again. His poll numbers dropped 15 points or whatever it was, 20 points, after Afghanistan and never recovered. And I think partially because people thought it confirmed what they were worried about, maybe, with the age, that maybe he wasn’t actually up to this. And so every piece of evidence they ever got in either direction—people were wildly fond of his policies. He was passing bills in a divided Congress and sometimes a Democratic Congress. But he was passing these bills, and they were all working out. The problem was that nobody ever gave him credit for it ’cause nobody believed that Joe Biden, this old guy on TV, could possibly be up to doing these really great things. They never gave him credit. Frum: Well, I may not have liked those bills as much as you did, but what can be pointed out is, he passed more legislation with a thinner margin. Obama, at one point, had 60 senators. Biden was playing cards in a pair of twos and a pair of threes. And he would get things passed, so whether you liked the legislation or not, the legislative accomplishment, especially in the first year, was quite enormous. He also, if I can talk about your former boss for a minute. Simmons: Yeah. Frum: Because he never faced mortality, he never made the decisions about a vice president that someone who is thinking about succession would. I’ve always thought that the way you set a vice president up for success is by giving them jobs that are high impact, but low rancor. And the classic example of this is what Clinton did to Gore in the late ’90s. Airplane travel in the 1990s was not as safe as it is today, and there were some high-profile crashes in, I think, either Clinton’s first term or second term. And so he convened a national commission on airline safety, and he put Gore in charge of it. Now, that’s a perfect job for a vice president because who’s against airline safety? But also, no one’s looking over the vice president’s shoulder. Everyone understands that if you put the vice president in charge of an airline-safety commission, that is the highest level of scrutiny these decisions are going to get because there’s no appealing this to the president because he’s dealing with issues of war and peace and taxes and budget. Unless they do something really radioactive, he is not gonna review it. The vice president is the senior official, so deal with him. And you enhance the vice president’s authority. You give them something to talk about that they have done, something that’s broadly popular. The worst thing you can do to them is give them something like the border, which is high intensity, where the vice president can’t make these decisions stick. Everyone will be looking over the vice president’s shoulder to the president, who will always be the real decision maker on the most sensitive issue of the day. And if you do that, you set the vice president up for failure. And I thought, again and again, Biden did not set Harris up for success, because he couldn’t bear the thought he might have to have a real plan to let her run in 2024. Simmons: Oh, I think that’s right. I think he had no plan ever to have her run in 2024. (Laughs.) I’m not sure. I think other people heard him say “transitional figure” and they thought he meant the next four years. I think he always was thinking, I was setting somebody up for the next eight years. And so I think there was a real concern about that. Maybe if the Democrats had done worse in the 2022 midterms. Look, we did well in 2022 midterms. We stopped the red wave or whatever it was. And I think that gave people a greater sense of confidence about him and about the prospects for 2024 than was warranted. And so a bunch of decisions were made after that—’cause if you are thinking about that, you do what you said. Clinton wasn’t that great to Gore in the first term, but in the second term, he knew what was happening, and so I think he did try to take care of him. Biden probably had the same idea, like, Oh, well, we’ll help the kid out after Election Day, and then she’ll have the chance to show what she can do. But, yeah, immediately before, no, that’s not how it worked. Frum: Well, your point about 2022 is so important and powerful. And because Republicans gained a slim majority in the House in 2022, I don’t think people remember now how big a Democratic year that was, and especially at the state level. Simmons: Two governors’ races, an extra Senate seat. Frum: And four state legislative bodies. But maybe the illusion created was that those state races were very much driven by abortion politics. And that led to the idea that the 2024 presidential race could also be about abortion politics. And I think Harris made a big bet on that hypothesis, and it turned out to be wrong. Simmons: Absolutely true. Absolutely. We were all enamored. Look, it was a horrible day, the Dobbs decision day. I remember it very vividly. It was a horrible time. Everybody was very depressed about it. But when she locked in and started focusing on it, and the White House gave her permission to talk about it and to run on it and actually encouraged her to do it and supported her to do it, it became a very motivating factor. And I think it was the time that she was at the height of her power in the White House because she was at the height of her power in the country, and people in the country were waiting for her voice, they heard it, they responded to it, and they wanted to hear her. She got invited everywhere to come and talk about it in Democratic world. And so that was not the case prior to that decision. And so while it was a bad decision from a progressive standpoint about abortion, politically, it was something that really benefited Harris, and I think she kept running on it, but the tail had narrowed on its impact. Frum: Well, how much are you worried about that history repeating itself in ’26 and ’28? It looks like ’26 is shaping up to be a big Democratic year. Tariffs, price increases, now the Iran war, it’s all bad news to the Republicans. But a lot of those are issues that a 2028 Republican nominee can jettison. It will be hard for, if it is [J. D.] Vance, for him to jettison the tariffs because he’s been so enthusiastic about that. But he can jettison the Iran war, and should somebody else be the nominee—and that’s not impossible—they can jettison both the Iran war and the tariffs. And meanwhile, Democrats may make decisions about ’26 that lock them into place for ‘28 or may learn lessons from ’26 that don’t hold to ’28. Simmons: Yeah, I think that this is something that Democrats have to pay a lot of attention to. You have to be thinking about the next campaign and not the last one. I think everyone wants to always base the future off of that past, and it doesn’t really work out. Vance will have a harder time, and I think it may not be a particular issue, but it all depends, again, as I said before, on how people perceive the Trump era. And if what they’re looking for is a palate cleanser from Donald Trump, there’s almost nothing that J. D. Vance can do to get away from it. Al Gore tried to get away from Bill Clinton’s Monica [Lewinsky] mess, and it led to people being ambivalent about Al Gore, and we sort of had an ambivalent result in 2000, right? (Laughs.) You gotta run with the person who brung you. And if Trump is viewed [as] somewhat more popularly, Vance has a chance. If he’s viewed as someone who was a wrecking ball to the country and our international standing in the world, I don’t see how J. D. Vance escapes that. Marco Rubio may also have some trouble with it, but he may be able to distance himself a little further than J. D. Vance, who was conceivably in the White House for all the big choices. Frum: Well, you have some options. So George H. W. Bush ran in 1988 as, I’ll keep the main things you liked about Reagan, especially the no-taxes promise, but it’s gonna be less hard-edge, kinder. The things you remember from that campaign are his promise: “a kinder, gentler America.” Simmons: Yes. “A thousand points of light.” Frum: Yeah, I’m going to conserve what you like about Reagan, but I’m not going to do more—that was his message—I’m not gonna go farther. And I’m gonna just bring down the temperature a little bit. Gore with Clinton had a problem, which is, what do you do with the scandals? And it wasn’t just Monica; it was fundraising scandals. Clinton raised money in a way—now we’re used to it, but then it was pretty shocking. And so Gore had, I think, two options. One was to say, You know what? I’m Clinton’s man. I agree with Clinton. I’m going to defend him. And the Monica thing was a hoax—or we wouldn’t have said “a hoax” in those days—was an unjust persecution. I defend him. And then you accept that you’re going to lose Tennessee, which Gore did, his home state, but maybe make it up in some other states where they like Clinton better. Or else you say, You know what? I’m repudiating him on this issue and saying, “That was terrible. I will never treat women that way. I’m my own man.” And then you lose some of the big Clinton groups, but you probably keep Tennessee. And either way, you win. But he couldn’t decide. Simmons: Yeah, and there was a third option, which I think was on the table, that they didn’t pursue. And nobody could have done it better than Clinton. I think Clinton would’ve come out and said to everyone, Well, what I’ve done was scurrilous. I haven’t been the best person I should have been. (Laughs.) He would’ve done all those things that a sinner does. And then he says, But you know who didn’t do that? Al Gore. That man, he was the one who told me when I was wrong. He was the one that stood up when I was making mistakes. And Clinton could have validated him in that way, but they wouldn’t— Frum: That’s brilliant. But then you need a very close personal relationship with Clinton. Simmons: Exactly. Frum: That’s a big ask, to ask him to do that. Simmons: But I think he would have done it. I think that Gore was really trying to figure it out on his own. This happens to people, right? I’m sure it’ll happen to my kid. It happened to me as a child of my parents. (Laughs.) You wanna stand on your own two feet. And I think sometimes that gets in the way of maybe making the best choices about how to be helped going forward. Frum: So Vance will have that problem, and maybe it will be insuperable for Vance. And Vance also has a couple of other disadvantages, which are unique to him, which is, he was very much elevated faster than on schedule, not by his own drive, but by his own ability to ingratiate himself with the nominee. This is not Carter picking Mondale because Mondale was one of the most important Democrats in the Senate. This is not Reagan picking H. W. Bush because Bush finished second in the primaries. This is a completely boutique choice that Trump made because he was flattered. Vance is gonna have a hard time saying, Yes, I’m my own man, because he has to deal with the risk of Trump undercutting him. And also, who is he really? He doesn’t have a strong pre-Trump identity. The one thing everybody knows about him is that he is the member of the Trump administration who’s been most hostile to America’s role in the world, most hostile to America’s allies, the one who called on [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky to grovel in front of Trump. So he may be able to walk away somewhat from Iran, but he can’t walk away from the tariffs, because he has believed in those. He’s believed in them more effusively than any member of the Trump administration, maybe even than Donald Trump himself. Simmons: Yeah, I think that’s right. Also, there’s something else, David. I would love to hear your opinion about this, ’cause it doesn’t usually matter in politics, but it feels like it’s starting to matter: the level of incompetence of just—this is a podcast, so I’ll say it—what my friends would call fuckery. (Laughs.) It just all seems like nobody’s quite up to the task. The systems don’t work. I don’t know. It feels to me like that’s penetrating. And maybe it’s things like the White House ballroom and some of those things, tearing down the East Wing. Some of those things are starting to penetrate to people. I don’t know. Are you feeling that? Frum: Yeah, well, I think this war is an example of this, which is, the United States has been war-gaming conflict with Iran since the Carter administration, maybe even before. And they’re at half a century of these war games. And in every war game, the Iranian player’s first go-to move is close the Strait of Hormuz. (Laughs.) That’s moving the pawn out in front of the king. That’s their move one. So everyone knows that that’s their move one. So when you finally decide, as Carter decided not to, as Reagan decided not to, as every president since the hostage crisis of 1979, has decided not to, when you decide it’s go time—and look, the Iranians have a lot of American blood on their hands. There’s a lot of business here. There have been a lot of presidents who I’m sure came very close to calling it go time. But when you call it go time, you have to anticipate, Okay, so what do we do about the Strait of Hormuz problem? What’s our answer? And the idea that you would call it go time on this issue and not have thought about the most obvious Iranian countermove, or not taken it seriously, that is, as you say, a level of, What? What are you guys doing? You didn’t think of it? You didn’t plan for it? The most obvious thing? Simmons: The other one that I think started it was the Signal chat group, not because of what happened, necessarily, although people can tell you, What? You put somebody—is that everybody uses social media. People are texting all the time. (Laughs.) And the idea that the secretary of defense inadvertently added somebody to his group chat, the same way you inadvertently added your cousin to the wrong—his name starts with the same name as your best friend from college, that doesn’t hold a lot of water for people. Irt penetrates, and people think, What are these guys doing? What’s happening over there? Frum: Yeah. Well, that was a huge event in the history of The Atlantic. And one of the things—and, again, this may not be something that penetrates to everybody who’s casually watching politics—but one of the things that needs to be stressed about that was when our editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently added, Jeffrey takes national security extremely seriously. He knew that [Pete] Hegseth had put the lives of service members at risk, and he wanted no part of it. First, nothing was published until after the operation was completely concluded. And second, even then, knowing that there were operational details, they didn’t quote the texts, because there are always in these situations, or often, something that you, as even a fairly sophisticated consumer of this material, may not understand the gravity of. So you just be very careful with it because there may be something there that will put things at risk that are important and you don’t know it. Simmons: It penetrated through because it’s such a mundane mistake at its core that a lot of people have made. And the same way people believe that there are these great conspiracies that are behind all the big things that happen in the world, they also believe, because of that, that silly, dumb things shouldn’t happen, because aren’t you guys supposed to be the ones that are orchestrating the future of Middle East oil policy, and you did this? What are you doing? Frum: Well, you mentioned the ballroom. Just think how much less trouble Trump would be in on the ballroom if he’d called it a conference room. Simmons: Yes. The conference center, right. The White House Conference Center, right. (Laughs.) Frum: We need a White House conference center. A lot of people say, You know what? That makes sense. I can see that you probably do need a White House conference center, yeah. And this thing was built in 1942, and it’s full of asbestos, and it’s out of date. Yeah, that makes sense. (Laughs.) Simmons: That’s right. I talked to a former White House social secretary, a Democrat, who told me that—she said, If he had tried, he could have built a bipartisan coalition to do this, because it is the thing that is talked about most among the White House social secretaries, the limited space and how hard it is to host an event in the mansion at the White House. So everybody would’ve been in favor of building something new. But that wasn’t what he’s up to. He just wanted to do what he wanted to do. Frum: And it’s not just for parties. If you wanna bring in every living survivor of some past military event to honor them together, the East Room is the biggest room, and it gets crowded. You can put them outside, but then, in Washington, it’s either raining or too humid or too cold. Simmons: (Laughs.) If there is a security concern, you could have gone to the Senate and the House, and told them, We need a new security configuration, and here’s how we plan on doing it. Frum: (Laughs.) The things you have to do is, you have to ask Congress, you have to have a planning committee, you have to make it respect other Washington monuments, and you have to say, You know what? And we will pay for it properly. I don’t have much more of your time left— wanna ask you one last thing. If you were advising a Democratic candidate of 2028, how would you tell them how to manage this tension between the activists, the more progressive, the hyper-online and the people who responded to James Clyburn’s call in 2020: older, more working class, more female, more Southern, less educated. Is there a true path to find? Simmons: Well, the thing that is uniting Democrats right now—and I don’t hear anybody talking about policy. It’s amazing to me. I have not heard anybody really talk about Democratic policy in the hinterlands, right? In Washington, people are thinking about it all the time, and there are these Project 2029 efforts. But the thing that I would say is, number one, get in it now. Don’t wait. Don’t wait ’til after the elections. People wanna see you standing up. This is what Gavin Newsom understands well. I don’t know if Gavin Newsom could be the nominee. But here’s what Gavin Newsom understands well, which is that people want somebody who’s gonna stand up, who’s gonna appear to be fearless, who’s gonna try to call it as they see it and is gonna be creative in their online presence. So figure out your online presence. You don’t have to be silly, necessarily, if that’s not your bag. But you gotta figure out how to be creative online. You gotta figure out, what is your contest against Donald Trump? And I think that unites people ’cause Trump is a uniting figure. That’s not gonna work in 2028. In 2026, it will unite people against him. In 2028, you ultimately then have to have something you’re for. I’ve been thinking a lot about American competitiveness, American security, and American unity, right, that those three things all need to go together. And if we can figure out how we talk about those things in a way that brings Americans together to make sure that we’re safe and make sure that we’re gonna be able to compete with our adversaries around the world, I think you can find a lot of domestic policy that can fit underneath those three things. But you’ve gotta find something that people can rally around and be for. And like I said, you’ve gotta figure out how to get in Donald Trump’s face and make the argument that you’re not MAGA and that you’re willing to fight MAGA, wherever it is. My last point on this: The person who’s benefited from this the most—Trump has basically created the Mark Kelly candidacy, right? Mark Kelly was a nice guy, a senator. Who doesn’t like an astronaut? But the fact that Trump has attacked him because of his statement about not following orders for the upper echelons of the military if they’re illegal, but the fact that Trump has attacked him for that has turned Mark Kelly into more of a folk hero with people who weren’t paying that much attention. So I think how you conduct yourself when the fights happen, when they come to you, is gonna be incredibly important. Frum: Well, as a non-Democrat and a long time, for many years, in the Republican Party and knowing how the other person plays their hands, my one suggestion would be, to borrow a phrase that the late Fred Siegel applied to Rudy Giuliani when Giuliani was at his maximum of success, he said the secret to Giuliani’s success was that he was an “immoderate centrist.” So a lot of people think that to be a centrist means to be always in that, Well, gee, I don’t know. I could do it one way; I could do it the way. Simmons: Yeah. A little of this little, a little of that. Frum: A little of that. And the point to Giuliani was he had this ferocious manner, but while he was mayor, his politics were mapped more or less to where the center of gravity in his city was. And so Democrats are often offered these choices between people who are very large candidates, very big personalities, but have extreme views, or candidates who have more moderate views, but they look kind of wishy-washy and kind of frightened. And the secret is to be not politically extreme, but to have a big personality. And I think that’s the thing that Gavin Newsom is trying to do, and as you say, he may not be the right candidate. But I think he’s found an interesting approach—he doesn’t take wild positions, but he takes them in a way that is very forceful and uncompromising and unafraid. Simmons: You know who used to do that, which now we think of him ’cause we think of all the bad parts, but Bill Clinton was that when he ran in 1992 and even in 1996. It was an incredibly moderate platform, but he went out there every day and he sold it. (Laughs.) He put energy behind it, and he sold it. And so he made people feel like, Oh, this is somebody who I wanna follow because he knows where he wants to go. And I think that is incredibly important. People always wanna know, what is the strength of this candidate? Can they take a punch? Can they deliver a punch? And I can think of a couple of Democrats right now who I like, but they’ve gotta show they can take some punches and that they can throw some blows. And if they can do that, they’ll be fine. Here’s the one practical thing I’ve been saying to Democrats too: Don’t fill out the questionnaires. All the groups in American politics will send questionnaires to Democratic candidates and say, Where do you stand on these hundred issues? And you’re supposed to check off where you are. Just have a blanket policy, no questionnaires. I’m happy to send you a 700-word op-ed that explains my position on the environment, but I’m not filling out your questionnaire. Frum: Jamal Simmons, thank you so much for joining me today. Simmons: Thank you. It was good to be here. David. [Music] Frum: Thanks so much to Jamal Simmons for joining me today. My book this week is a novel, The Magician, by Colm Tóibín. Published in 2021, The Magician is an imaginative reconstruction of the life of Thomas Mann, the great German writer. Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck in 1875 and died in exile from his native Germany in 1955. In between, he remade modern literature in German with a series of astonishingly important novels—he won the Nobel Prize [in] Literature—and a man of conservative sensibility, someone who supported his country’s government in the First World War and only belatedly became a believer in German democracy in the 1920s. He was also an opponent of the Nazi regime, married a Jewish woman, and had six Jewish children with her, all of whose lives were at risk because of the Nazi takeover of his country, and who found himself in exile, dealing with what had happened to the country he loved and to whom he gave such voice. Colm Tóibín presents Mann as a man riven by deep internal contradictions and desires. Thomas Mann was a man of homosexual desire and some homosexual relationships, but he lived most of his life in a marriage, seemingly a happy one, that gave birth to his six children. He was a person, as I said, of conservative instinct, but he became an important leader of German democracy and even visited the new East Germany in 1949 and tried to find some way of reconciling the division of his country after the Second World War. This novel speaks to me, above all, as the profile of someone who was a deeply nonrevolutionary man living in nonrevolutionary times, and tried to hold on to both a sense of his country’s past and a sense of his own personal continuity as everything around him changes. How much is this a story of our own lives in these revolutionary times, where it seems, because of technology, but also because of political change, that the world we knew when we were young, even if we’re not such old people as I myself am, seems to be receding out of hand, and yet there are values back there that we wanna take with us into a new time? That was Thomas Mann’s literary problem. It was his political problem. It was his personal problem. And it is a problem to which Tóibín gives powerful voice in this beautiful and intimate novel, The Magician. I learned deeply from it, and I still find myself thinking about it in some of the quiet hours of reflection of the worlds that I myself sometimes feel that I have lost. Thanks so much [for] joining me on the program today. I hope if you want to support the work of this program and of all of us at The Atlantic, you will do so in the most effective way by subscribing to The Atlantic. I am so appreciative of your time and attention, whether you watch or whether you view. See you next week on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye. [Music]
Author: David Frum.
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