• On Monday night, President Joe Biden kicked off the Democratic National Convention. In his speech, a political swan song, Biden looked back on his major accomplishments during his term as president. And, somewhat awkwardly, many people clapping and cheering on Monday were the same people who pressured Biden to drop his re-election bid. The party is moving on with Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket while Biden winds down his political career. Franklin Foer, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of “The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future,” discusses Biden’s legacy.
• While the GOP had to settle for Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan, the Democrats will have no problem bringing the star power to the DNC. Olivia Craighead, a writer covering pop culture and celebrity for The Cut, highlights the famous folks throwing their support behind the Harris-Walz campaign this week.

• Check out Franklin’s reporting – https://tinyurl.com/3vdn8cpb
• Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8
• What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast

Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/

TRANSCRIPT

Josie Duffy Rice: It’s Tuesday, August 20th. I’m Josie Duffy Rice.

Tre’vell Anderson: And I’m Tre’vell Anderson. And this is What a Day, the show where we’re giving you the highlights from the first night of the DNC. As President Joe Biden ceremonially passed the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Josie Duffy Rice: We’re lowering the cut the malarkey flag to half mast in his honor. I want that flag. If anybody has one. [music break] On today’s show, we’re foregoing the headlines to bring you two conversations about this week’s Democratic National Convention. Or in other words, Crooked Media’s Super Bowl. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yes. A little later, I’m going to get the tea about all the celebrity action at the DNC, including if Beyonce and Taylor Swift might be involved because the streets are talking, Josie. 

Josie Duffy Rice: They are talking. The streets rarely know what they’re talking about, but maybe this time they do. [laughter] But first, President Joe Biden kicked off the convention Monday night with a reflection on his four years in office. 

[clip of President Joe Biden] And with a grateful heart. I stand before you now on this August night to report that democracy has prevailed. [cheers] Democracy. Democracy has delivered. And now democracy must be preserved. [cheers]

Josie Duffy Rice: In his speech, Biden also ticked off some of his major accomplishments during his first and now only term as president. He noted that he ushered the nation out of the Covid pandemic. He passed major legislation to improve infrastructure, address climate change and strengthen gun control. He played an instrumental role in uniting NATO to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and he said he led the charge to stabilize American democracy in the face of deep political divisions. 

Tre’vell Anderson: But it’s a little awkward, right? A month ago, the convention was supposed to be all about Biden and his vision for a second term. Instead, Monday’s speech was kind of his political swansong, and many of the people clapping and cheering were the same people who pressured him to drop his reelection bid. Now the party is moving on with Harris at the top of the ticket while he winds down his political career. 

Josie Duffy Rice: It’s a lot for someone who spent the last half century in politics, who never made any secret about his ambition to be president and who clearly hoped for a second term. So for more on Biden’s legacy as president, I spoke with someone who literally wrote the book on it. Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the struggle for America’s Future. It’s a behind the scenes account of the first two years of Biden’s presidency, from his swearing in a few weeks after the January 6th riots to the 2022 midterms, and everything in between. Here’s our conversation. Biden, especially during the primary, right? Like he was the moderate who is appealing to the centrist, to the Never Trump Republicans. But he’s been a pretty progressive president, especially up until Gaza. It’s of course, it’s debatable, but in four years, his administration relaxed laws around birth control and medication abortion. They push to extend title nine protections to cover LGBTQ students. He lowered some prescription drug costs. He wiped out tens of billions of dollars in student debt, aggressively pursued antitrust litigation against tech companies. They bolstered unions like it goes on and on and on. Obviously, it’s not totally binary, but do you think that this is who he imagined he’d be as president, that this is the agenda he envisioned? 

Franklin Foer: Not quite. Largely because in his own head, he’s a great man in history, and I think he wanted to have an accomplishment that you would set next to the New Deal or the Great Society. And he came so close to getting that if Joe Manchin had gone along with Build Back Better and you got the extension of the social safety net in all of those directions, he would have cemented that place, I think, in your list of accomplishments. I would also point to the Inflation Reduction Act, which I think is maybe potentially the biggest of them all. And so much of that actually depends on its implementation over the course of the next four years. Right now it looks like Obamacare looked like after the first couple of years, you weren’t sure whether it would be judged a success or not. But if the Harris administration is able to finish implementing the Inflation Reduction Act, you then have this massive jump start to a green economy where he basically took a big chunk of the Green New Deal and he made it happen. You know, in some ways it’s like that he aimed for so much with this thin majority meant that there was inevitably disappointment when he failed to shoot the moon. But on the other hand, by pushing so hard for so much, he was able to get what he was able to get. So, I mean, I think you’re also probably alluding to the bipartisan nature of what he was able to accomplish in the Chips act and the infrastructure bill and the like. And that surprised me because I had so dismissed Senate Republicans as useless, that the fact that he was able to rally at least ten of them to get on board for those pieces of legislation is something. 

Josie Duffy Rice: This is interesting because I hear what you’re saying to be that he tried to do so much, he decided, hey, I’m going to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks more than maybe we realize stuck. But also that has kind of hurt him in some way, because people also realize what didn’t stick. Am I hearing that correctly? 

Franklin Foer: Yeah, it doesn’t feel as good as it should. Because he bloated expectations by creating the possibility of doing a successor to the New Deal, Great Society. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Let’s talk a little bit about his failures. So Gaza, I feel like is definitely the biggest one in the sense of like how it’s kind of like shaped the politics of the country in some ways. But there’s also Afghanistan. And then obviously inflation is up. I don’t know if we would consider that his failure, but it has happened under his watch. What do you take from that? How do you think that that kind of has affected his legacy, if it has affected it at all? 

Franklin Foer: I think it’s affected the perceptions of Joe Biden. So you look at all of these things, you’ll get Afghanistan, you look at inflation, you look at Gaza, you look at the border. I think the way that people perceive these things, a lot of people perceive things is that the world is spinning out of control, and that there was this old guy who just didn’t have the energy to put a cork in it. He couldn’t stop the world from descending into chaos. And maybe the world descended into chaos because he was old and people perceived his weakness. And I can’t say that there’s maybe not some truth to that on some level, but just to go item by item, I think with Afghanistan, I think that’s a decision that may look much better with time. Everybody said on the day that this was evidence of America’s weakness. Nobody would ever trust America again. But America was able to and Biden especially was able to rally a coalition to try to stymie Putin pretty effectively. American leadership hasn’t disappeared because of Afghanistan, and he was able to effectively turn the page on America’s longest war and on the war on terror and pivot American foreign policy in a different direction. When it comes to inflation, there was a trade off in what he did, he kept America running at full employment. And so people paid higher prices in exchange for having jobs. People don’t think in that sort of way. They just think about how they experience the economy. And Gaza, Gaza is a mess. I mean, the question that I think fairly gets asked is if he had been more active in taking harsher steps to try to bend Netanyahu to his will, could he have meaningfully changed the way that Israel prosecuted its war, or not even prosecuted the war at all? And I think that there’s maybe even some wishful thinking that happens there, because Israel has its is an independent nation that has its own interests. And I mean in his thinking, I think if you cut off Israel altogether, then you’d have zero leverage. I think it’s fair to say, okay, well, you have this leverage. You haven’t effectively been able to deploy it. 

Josie Duffy Rice: The thing that’s interesting and you kind of touched on this with like thinking about the world of possibility. Right? But it is true that Biden did some pretty big things. It’s not to say he didn’t make any mistakes, but he accomplished a lot and it didn’t really translate to voter enthusiasm. What is that about? Like, was it really just his age? Was there something else? Because even before the debate, people weren’t excited. 

Franklin Foer: Yeah. They weren’t buying what he was selling. There’s no doubt about it. He wasn’t making an argument. I mean, that’s the frustrating thing. When Harris first appeared as the nominee. What was so refreshing, I mean, it was the basics. She was making arguments. She was attacking her opponent. She was packaging her positions. So I think he wasn’t actually even running a campaign before. I mean, that’s there was nothing for people to latch on to. I think age is hugely significant. I’ve been I’ve gone back and I’ve tried to talk to people in the administration as best I can to just ask the question, because I reread his first two years and the age was there in this story, but it didn’t feel like he was unable to do the job. And I was like, wait, did I miss something in the course of this? And people are like, no, in the first couple years of the administration, he’s different than he is now. Age comes on you incredibly quickly, and six months when you’re rounding 80 matters in pretty extraordinary ways a lot of the time. And I think that decline has hit him harder because, you know what’s really stressful and takes a lot out of you? Running for president. [laugh] 

Josie Duffy Rice: You argue in your book, or the premise of your book is basically that Biden is essentially the last of a dying breed of politician. Can you tell us a little bit what you mean by that? 

Franklin Foer: What I meant was that we’ve gone through this cycle where both Trump and Obama were anti politicians who ran against a system who thought that the system was somehow inherently corrupt. And Biden had this underlying faith in the ability to use politics as a way of bridging disagreements. And so you had to prove that persuasion was still possible, that compromise was still possible, that it was still possible to accept defeat when you were legitamately defeated. One of the things that I’ve thought about Harris as she’s emerged and I thought about this as I was reporting the book, because one very top White House aide once told me that she’d had a conversation with the vice president where she was like, you know, you and the president despite appearances, despite everything are much more alike than anybody in the world–

Josie Duffy Rice: Mmmm. 

Franklin Foer: –appreciates. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Wow, that’s so interesting. 

Franklin Foer: And what she meant by that was that actually, when it comes down to sitting in a meeting, the type of questions that they asked were very similar, that they both have a very gritty understanding of how policy works. And so it’s not about academic questions or about abstractions. It’s always about, okay, so this policy is going to happen. How are people going to know about it? How are they going to be able to access this? If I’m on an Indian reservation, how am I going to be able to receive these benefits? And Biden would ask variations of the same questions. And then I also, just as I’ve watched her unfold in the way that she’s navigated all of the inherent complexities of this debut moment, I’ve thought they have a lot of the same tendencies to seek out broader ground in terms of how they have crafted their political personas, so maybe it could turn out that Biden is not the last politician, that he’s played some role in her elevation, in her education as a politician, but it could also be that she manages to take a lot of his skills, talents and instincts and manages to execute them better. 

Josie Duffy Rice: That was my conversation with Franklin Foer, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the book The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the struggle for America’s Future. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Thanks for that, Josie. We’ll talk about all the star power at the DNC in a moment, but if you like our show, make sure to subscribe and share it with your friends. We’ll be back after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK] 

Tre’vell Anderson: And we are back with more on this week’s DNC. It’s basically a sendoff party for President Biden and a welcome party for VP Harris. And, you know, the Democrats aren’t going to throw a party without inviting a bunch of their celebrity friends. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Yeah, that’s you know, we need some party in the party, you know? So who are some of the A-list guests that people are thinking are going to show up this week? 

Tre’vell Anderson: Everybody’s talking about Beyonce, Josie. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Look. 

Tre’vell Anderson: That’s who the streets want to see. 

Josie Duffy Rice: That is who the streets want to see. That’s true. I also heard like Taylor Swift might show up? People love her. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Taylor Swift is also out in the streets. Absolutely. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Gowns, gowns. Beautiful gowns. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Very much so. No matter who comes through, though, it’ll be much better than Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock celebrating Trump at the RNC a few weeks ago. And speaking of over the weekend, y’alls little former president was over on Truth Social posting AI generated images of women wearing Swifties for Trump shirts, and he also included an AI picture of Taylor Swift in an Uncle Sam costume, captioned quote, “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump.” He said he quote unquote, “accepted this fake endorsement.” So definitely not beating those weird allegations now. Anyway, I wanted to find out more about the real famous folks throwing their support behind the Harris Walz campaign this week. I spoke with Olivia Craighead. She’s a writer covering pop culture and celebrity for The Cut. And she began by telling me about some of the notables hosting the DNC through Thursday. 

Olivia Craighead: What we know for sure is that every night there’s going to be a different host for the event. So Monday night, Tony Goldwyn from Scandal, Tuesday night Ana Navarro from The View, Wednesday night will be Mindy Kaling, and then Thursday night for The Big Show, it’s going to be Kerry Washington. So two different Scandal actors are confirmed for the DNC. Shout out to Shonda. 

Tre’vell Anderson: What’s going on there, Olivia? Why is Shonda Rhimes all up in the DNC? What’s going on? 

Olivia Craighead: Those two, Tony Goldwyn and Kerry Washington just kind of like love a little GOTV moment. They’re like some of our biggest Democrats, I guess, and they’ve worked their way up to DNC level. Kerry has been in the DNC a couple times. She’s an old pro at this point. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Certainly, certainly. Now, there are some rumors swirling about potential appearances this week by a one Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter, perhaps a Taylor Swift. What is the likelihood of these megastars showing up in Chicago? 

Olivia Craighead: The way I see it. It’s much more likely that Beyonce shows up than Taylor shows up. That is kind of how I see it. I think Beyonce is a little more politically engaged than Taylor is. Taylor is also currently, as we’re talking, in London, like wrapping up the European leg of the Eras tour. So she might honestly be tired, but I don’t think Beyoncé would miss out on the opportunity to perform for what might be the first Black woman president. I feel that she understands the importance of the moment. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah, yeah. I also have to ask, what would be the significance if someone like a Beyoncé or a Taylor Swift do not just show up, but perform at the DNC? 

Olivia Craighead: If I were planning the DNC, what I would be hoping for was a big, huge moment that really got people excited about the idea of voting Democrat. And that is exactly what a big moment like that would do. No offense to boomers, but I know that James Taylor is performing and that is not exactly the same thing as Beyonce, as Taylor. 

Tre’vell Anderson: At all. [laughter] Now, TMZ recently reported that the Harris Walz campaign is trying not to overdo it with celebrities at the DNC this year. I wonder from your vantage point, what some of the risks might be of too much celeb presence in this or any election? 

Olivia Craighead: So in 2020 it was a Covid convention, so everything was a little more scaled back. But I don’t know if you remember 2016, that was a celebrity bonanza of a convention. And it felt out of touch, is what I would say. It felt like, why was Lenny Kravitz performing at the DNC? Why did we have to have Katy Perry get up and say: 

[clip of Katy Perry] Let’s rock for Hillary! 

Olivia Craighead: I think some of those moments can be cheesy, especially as you remember that video of all the celebrities singing fight song acapella from 2016. 

Tre’vell Anderson: I do, yes, I do. 

[clip of celebrities singing Fight Song acapella] This is our fight song. Take back the our light song. 

Olivia Craighead: It’s stuff like that that I think is easy to clown on that they, Harris Walz campaign, would be smart to sort of shy away from and focus on, like actual issues that they’re trying to get out right now. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah. And also, I mean, just generally speaking, in what ways have you seen celebrity involvement in elections change over time? 

Olivia Craighead: When I was a kid, it was all about rocking the vote, and there was less of a connection from celebrity to regular person. So see you’d see a celebrity in a Rock the vote t shirt, and you’d think, I guess they are politically engaged. And that was kind of it. That was all they had to do. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Right. 

Olivia Craighead: To be present. And now I feel like there is a greater level of pressure on famous people to be informed and to be engaged. And I think something like going to the DNC is a way for them to show that they’re listening. And because anyone could wear a t shirt, but, you know, it takes a little more effort to book a flight to Chicago and sit through speeches from mayors and union presidents and all of that. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah. Do you think celebrity endorsements even matter anymore to voters? 

Olivia Craighead: I really don’t know. I think what is almost more important is celebrities telling people to register to vote. You know, I think you see that when Taylor Swift posts a link on her Instagram Stories, you can see that 30,000 people, new voters are registered. And that is very important. Do I think people should be voting the way that their favorite celebrity is voting? No, I think that’s silly. But you know, if that’s what gets my candidate elected, like, sure, go for it. But I do think that young voters will change their minds about celebrities if they don’t have what that person perceives as good politics. So, you know, you have, let’s say, Sexyy Red being sort of a pro Trumper. People are going to turn on her because of those opinions. But I don’t know that she is out here convincing people to vote for Trump in the 2024 election. So I think it actually behooves celebrities more than it does actual young people to be outspoken and to have opinions that are for the greater good. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah, well, I’m so glad nobody have taken their political news from Sexyy Red of all people. Okay. [laughter]

Olivia Craighead: Me too. 

Tre’vell Anderson: That was my conversation with Olivia Craighead from The Cut. Josie, I have to imagine that you also are glad people aren’t taking their political advice from Sexyy Red. 

Josie Duffy Rice: That isn’t even a possibility I had considered, so I’m glad to know it’s not happening I hope. 

Tre’vell Anderson: We can only hope. 

Josie Duffy Rice: We can only hope. [music break]

[AD BREAK] 

Josie Duffy Rice: That is all for today. If you liked the show, make sure you subscribe. Leave a review. Try to act chill if Beyoncé shows up at the DNC and tell your friends to listen. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And if you are into reading and not just the line up of DNC speakers like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Tre’vell Anderson. 

Josie Duffy Rice: I’m Josie Duffy Rice. 

[spoken together] And Washington Goldwyn 2028. 

Tre’vell Anderson: We’re starting early people okay. 

Josie Duffy Rice: He’d be a great VP. [laughter] All you have to do is just look hot all the time. Can you picture two white men more different than Tony Goldwyn and Tim Walz? 

Tre’vell Anderson: Well. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Bill Lancz. Our associate producer is Raven Yamamoto. We had production help today from Michell Eloy, Ethan Oberman, Jon Millstein, Greg Walters and Julia Claire. Our showrunner is Erica Morrison and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. 

[AD BREAK]