Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon
to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you
want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream,
my daily show prep with all of the links, become
a patron, go to thepeteclendershow dot com. Make sure you
hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right
to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so
much for your support. So in the first hour today
we played some clips. We joined live in progress, we
jypped it jip join in progress, the Pete Hegseth confirmation
hearing that was underway up on Capitol Hill. He's the
nominee for Secretary of Defense. Not going to go over anymore.
They've wrapped up that hearing now. But one of the
things and I'm just going to read this assessment and
then pivot into a related topic, which is a post
from the rad Meta and he says the democra And
there's a picture side side photo which is a screenshot
off of c SPAN and it's Kristin Gilibrand. And I
mentioned her and her performance where she was just like
screeching and screaming. And so there's a picture of her
with like her mouth open, furrowed brow yelling and her finger,
you know, one finger in the air like pointing, and
next to her is Pete hegseeth and he's just got
this like, I don't know what you would call that expression,
just one of just like zoning out with his eyes closed.
You know, he's not smiling, he's not frowning, he's not
doing anything really with his mouth. It's just like a
flatlined mouth, you know, and he's got his eyes closed.
Just hmmm. And I'm just speaking here. I think from
you know, me personally as a dude, that picture says
something to me. And maybe it's because you know, if
you're raised by your mom, you have encountered that kind
of interaction and it's just like hmm mm hm, and
you're just and he has to sit there and listen
to it. He can't do anything, so he's got to
just sit there and listen to this yelling. And varaed
Meta said quote the Democrats becoming the party of the
angry mother in law slash hectoring wife is something they
might want to do something about. And I think this
is true. This was one of the things against Hillary Clinton,
and you know, when she would try to get the
crowds riled up, and she would try to be you know,
forceful and even yet a little angry, and she just
came across like a screaming, shrill scold and it's annoying
and I don't want to listen to it. I'm sitting
there watching it. I'm thinking, I do not want to
have to listen to this for four years now. To
be fair, I say that about virtually all politicians, men
and women alike. So I just I wonder if there's
something to this. And in a related story, there's a
website called Persuasion persuasion dot community and I track this
as left of center. The people that write over there,
you could sign up for a free newsletter and read
some of this stuff, and they have various people, they
write on various topics, and the vast majority of the
time I really don't care what they're saying. But every
now and again, somebody writes a piece that I am
interested in. That's why I'm on there free. I don't
pay for it. Free newsletter Persuasion and this one was
written by Jeffrey Tyler Sick or psych s y c K.
I'm assuming that's Dutch, so would be sick psaych. Anyway,
he's an assistant professor of political science and history at
the University of Pikeville that is in Kentucky, by the way,
in case you are unaware of this esteemed college, and
he argues that a properly funded and intellectually robust movement
inside the Democrat Party could win back rural voters. What
movement would that be, Pete Ah, great question, glad you asked.
It is the brand new Blue Dogs, so that's it's
actually not new. They're resurrecting the Blue Dog movement. And
by they I mean three members of Congress. Well, by
three members Congress, I mean two members and one who
just lost reelection. So it's going very well, right, The
effort is off to a fantastic start. Jared Golden of Maine,
Mary Poltola of Alaska, and Marie Glusen camp Perez of
Washington State. And Mary Poltola of Alaska lost. She lost
her reelection bit so she's already out as one of
the Blue Dog leaders. But other than that, things are
going well. This is Jeffrey Tyler sick or psych in
persuasion quote. Founded in nineteen ninety five and long the
resting place of racist, politically antidiluvian Southern Democrats, the Blue
Dogs have been revamped by three young politicians on a
mission to make their party relevant in rural America again.
So would that be make Democrats relevant in rural America again?
So M d r R A A md r R
A madurarah, you gotta roll it. I guess I don't know.
Bad acronym, guys, You guys got to come up with
something better than that. But the Blue Dogs cultivate a
combination of esthetics. But of course they're Democrats, so style
over substance, right, you gotta have It's got to look
good these esthetics as well as policy positions that they
hope will allow their party to flourish moderate economic stances
with the justicemidge of populism. Throw in some candidates with
unorthanox yet relatable personal backgrounds. Really, you two were read
to at an early age, had a drag queen story hour.
Look look at that? What a trajectory and social liberalism
shorn of all moralistic tripe. That is a fancy way
of saying, be liberal, but stop preaching right your I
say this all the time in debates with leftists. You
do not occupy a morally superior position. See once. Once
you say that in a discussion, in an argument, in
a debate with a leftist, it shatters this illusion from
which they operate that they are better than you. They
have a position that is morally superior to you, And
I usually tell them at some point, look, I want this.
You also want this, or so you claim, and I
will take you out your word for it. So we
both want this same outcome. For example, I want all
kids to be able to read by third grade, fifth
grade whatever, right like I want kids on grade level.
I want kids able to read and do math. You
do too, Oh isn't that fantastic? So we agree, So
you don't occupy a morally superior position. The difference here
is how best to achieve these shared stated goals right now.
Just because I have a different path that I want
to take to the same destination doesn't mean I'm evil.
It just means I think this is a better path
to get to the same destination that you claim you
want to get to. So why don't we just have
the discussion about the courses about the paths rather than
why I'm taking the path right, But obviously the moral
preening is necessary, so you don't actually have to have
the discussion about the policy or the paths. They don't
want to have the policy debate. They would just rather
ascribe the motive right, say that you are morally inferior,
therefore you're wrong and you hate people, and so shut up.
That's it. That's the whole point. So this is the formula.
According to this political science and history professor at the
University of Pikeville. The fighting Pikes, I believe, is their mascot,
the fish. So moderate economic stances, little bit of populism,
have a candidate with a weird but relatable personal background,
and do the social liberalism, but rip away all of
the moralistic tripe. I don't think they can do it.
Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to
a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina.
Just a quick drive up the mountain and cabins of Ashville.
Is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon,
maybe you want to play a memorable proposal or get
family and friends together for a big old reunion. Cabins
of Ashville has the ideal spot for you where you
can reconnect with your loved ones and the things that
truly matter. Nestled within the breath taking fourteen thousand acres
of the Pisga National Forest, their cabins offer a serene
escape in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Centrally
located between Asheville and the entrance of the Great Smoky
Mountain National Park. It's the perfect balance of seclusion and
proximity to all the local attractions with hot tubs, fireplaces,
air conditioning, smart TVs, Wi Fi, grills, outdoor tables and
your own private covered porch. Choose from thirteen cabins, six cottages,
two villas, and a great lodge with eleven king sized bedrooms.
Cabins of Ashville has the ideal spot for you for
any occasion, and they have pet friendly accommodations. Call or
text eight two eight, three six seven seventy sixty eight
or check out all there is to offer at Cabins
Offashville dot com and make memories that'll last a lifetime.
I just saw this post from Patrick Yeah. A tweet
from Patrick Raffini, who is a polster at Echelon insights.
He says a watershed moment as Pennsylvania becomes R plus
by presidential turnout, R plus means a Republican advantage. Obviously
a majority of the votes cast in in Pennsylvania were
for a Republican. Uh, they've got their final numbers. Now,
I guess their final turnout. These are turnout numbers. That
means you can He says that that means you can
throw out all the polling samples that had electorates of
a D plus three, which is like if you're if
you're going to put a poll out into the field,
you look at the you know, uh, past elections, what
the turnout was, what the voter registration is, and you
try to wait your survey, your poll based on that data.
And so the polls were going out and they were
trying to get three percent more Democrats than Republicans because
that historically was what the turnout, what the turnout actually was,
what the election results actually were. And so it was
a D plus three. No longer. This was never going
to be a D plus year in Pennsylvania. He says,
we were expecting Republicans to come out on top by
like twenty five thousand votes, but the final total now
is sixty five thousand. That's, as he says, a watershed moment.
And this ties into quite nicely the piece of persuasion
the Democrats trying to win back rural America. How will
they do it? In a recent video, Jared Golden, Congressman
of Maine, the leader of the Blue Dogs, this is
their vehicle that they say they're going to be using,
describe the group as quote rooted in loyalty to the
community we represent. Tell me something without saying anything. Though
localism is the central selling point of Blue Dogs, they
combine it with other typical centrist beliefs such as pluralism,
intellectual humility, and gradualist politics. In twenty twenty three, Marie
glues In camp Perez told the Washington Post quote, It's
not just about flipping seats for us, It's about the
long work of turning the train around. And but wouldn't
you just run in the other direction? Isn't turning the
ship around? Because trains, I feel like those are easier
to turn around because they're on tracks. And if you
just make a track that's a circle, just turn right around,
or just put the engines on the other side and
hould it that way anyway. Look, I'm just pointing out
the analogy doesn't really hold very well. But she says,
getting back to place based politics. That's what they're all about.
Place based politics. In other words, what might sell in
you know, Charlotte probably doesn't sell as well in Frog Pond,
North Carolina, for example. I'm just like, for example, right,
they may not be the same types of messages. She says,
got to get back to place based politics and not
focus grouped TWITTERADDI agendas And look, I agree with this
because the Democrat Party has become beholden too that very group,
that latter group, Right, these perpetually online younger people that
are leftists because they came through leftist education in doctrination
camps aka government schools, and so they come out of there,
and that's how you end up with Joe Biden sounding
like a comie, when Joe Biden never really sounded like
that in all of his seventeen decades in the Senate. Right, first,
they have to develop a cultural and ideological identity. However,
how do they do that? How do the Blue Dogs
do that? All? Right? I hope you had a happy
holiday season. But tell me if something like this happened
at your house. Your family and friends are gathered around,
Maybe y'all are in the living room and you're laughing,
swapping stories, reminiscing, and then somebody says, hey, Dad, remember
those old VHS tapes? Did you ever get them transferred?
And then the room gets all quiet. All eyes are
on Dad, who says, oh, you know, well, I've been
meaning to but I just having gotten around to it. Look,
don't let those priceless memories sit in a box for
another year, all right. Create a Video has been helping
families in the Charlotte area preserve their history since nineteen
ninety seven. Simply bring in your old camquarder tapes and
Creative Video will transfer them to a USB flash drive
for just fourteen ninety five per tape. You have a
big collection, They've got a discount for you. And next year,
instead of talking about those memories, imagine gathering the family
to watch them together. Talk about a memorable gift. So
do what I did. Trust the experts at Creative Video,
conveniently located in mint Hill right off I four eighty five,
and online at create a Video dot Com. Back to
the piece, at the Persuasion dot Community dot com by
Jeffrey Tyler Sich, Assistant professor of political science and history
at the University of Pikeville in Kentucky, talking about the
effort to revive the Blue Dog Democrats and they're going
to have some problems. I think the Blue Dog's lack
of a firm identity is in many ways a problem
that plagues all centrists. What makes them different from the
political extremes. On one hand, the Blue Dogs are Democrats,
and they carry all the baggage that comes with that label.
Fairly or not, voters see them as just progressives in
sheep's clothing. Yes, which actually, if I go back to
two paragraphs prior, he talked about describing them as a
gradualist party or movement, gradualist politics, Gradualist what does that mean?
Like Fabian socialism? You just you can't do it with
the violent overthrow of the government and the revolution because
in a free society with a free market system, people
are generally happy with that system. So you can't you
can't overthrow that system because you're gonna make their lives
pretty crummy in the short term and then even worse
in the long term. But they don't ever see that
part but gradualism, right, So we know where we're going,
we just have a different speed by which to get there.
And so yes, voter see blue dog Democrats as progressives
wanting the same things, but just doing it a little
bit more slowly. In other words, liars right, that's the problem.
No one becomes a Democrat unless they basically believe in
open borders and foisting socially radical views on the electorate,
or so goes the logic of many rural voters, that's
how they see Democrats. Now, this is the problem that
Democrats have, and it is i might add, of their
own making. Though this stereotype is something of a gross exaggeration,
he says, there is a kernel of truth to it,
and by colonel, I would suggest it's the whole popped corn.
On a range of issues, he says Democrats have moved
far afield of the average American voter, Like how do
you write that sentence right after the last one? Oh,
there's a kernel of truth to it, you know, in
so far as the Democrats are like so far to
the left of the average American. Now, this alone is
perhaps not a serious issue for the party. Except that
Democrats tend to pounce on those who question their ideological
doctrines with a fervor that would make New England's Puritan
settlers proud. See, even he recognizes the problem inside the
Democrat Party is shut up ery as soon as somebody
is like, well, you know what, I'm a Democrat. I
like Democrats policies more than I like Republican policies or whatever,
except for, for example, I'm just gonna pick one at random,
like abortion, right, I'm pro life, I'm a pro life Democrat.
Well then sorry, you are dead to us as Demos, right,
Like that's it. You cannot be pro life in the
Democrat Party any longer. At most, you can be pro
choice as long as that choice occurs, like after eight months.
Like that's about it. You cannot be a politician in
the Democrat Party and be pro life any longer. Remember
there was one a couple of years ago, like three
years ago, i want to say, and one of them
came out and said on pro life, and they got primaried.
So one need only look at the reactions from mainstream
Democrats when blue dogs break with party orthodoxy. For example,
Congresswoman Perez was recently savaged by fellow quote liberals for
refusing to back Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness plan, which
is not a forgiveness plan, it's a bailout. Golden Jared
Golden Golden was viciously attacked by fellow Democrats for his
opposition to the Build Back Better scheme. Thus, on the
lane left blue dog Democrats are squeezed from both sides,
to left wing for rural voters and to right wing
to be happily accepted by their own party. We see
this in North Carolina as well. This is why the Democrats,
despite the Democrat Party Chair Sippy Cup Clayton, right, despite
her efforts to say y'all and drop a bunch of
f bombs as a mechanism to attract rural voters, they
have not been successful in doing so. And it's why
we see it play out in this fight with The
latest one is Cecil Brockman, and we've covered that story.
He's a state representative out of like Guildford County area,
and he is for school choice and for that he
is savaged. Trisha Coffam here in Mecklenburg County flipped her
registration to Republican because of the way Democrats treated her,
which was rooted in this one issue. So if you
diverge from the Democrats playbook on anything, you are now
the enemy Blue Dog. This is why I don't think
blue Dogs are going to be successful. I mean not
as a movement. They may very well win their particular race.
They could very well keep winning their offices and win reelection,
except that woman from Alaska. She's already out. But like
you could see where they could keep winning election in
a Democrat area that has enough Republican voters that are
okay with her as a blue dog kind of Democrat
until she gets primary. And that's the problem for the
Blue Dogs. Rural Democrats desperately need to attract the support
of Trump voters. This requires the adoption of certain populist stances,
which for most Blue dog has been in the realm
of economics, so they are okay with Trump on some economics.
The difficulty, then, is for the Blue Dogs to develop
an identity that separates them from the leftists in the
Democrat Party while also offering something that Trump cannot. Golden
has taken himself to He's taken to describing himself as
a progressive conservative. They're gonna call themselves a progression, not
that they're progressing towards conservatism, right, because that's what it
sounds like. Classic democrat move right. Call yourself something, brand
yourself as some sort of a political philosophy that you
are actually the opposite of right. I'm a liberal, are you, though? Yeah?
You want to censor people's speech and stuff that like,
that's not liberal, That is not liberal. Trust me. I
grew up with liberals. I know a lot of liberals.
I remember liberalism in a toyday, and they were for
free speech. These were the people that were about the
warnings on music. You know, the appeal of the phrase
likely lies in its ambiguous sound. It's actually the way
rather apt description of the reconstituted blue dog Democrats. Yeah,
I'm not buying it, all right, if you're listening to
this show, you know I try to keep up with
all sorts of current events, and I know you do too.
And you've probably heard me say get your news from
multiple sources. Why, Well, because it's how you detect media bias,
which is why I've been so impressed with ground News.
It's an app and it's a website and it combines
news from around the world in one place so you
can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it
out at check dot ground, dot news slash Pete. I
put the link in the podcast description too. I started
using ground News a few months ago and more recently
chose to work with them as an affiliate because it
lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom.
The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored
by the left and the right. See for yourself check
dot ground, dot news slash pete. Subscribe through that link
and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use
the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature.
Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it
also supports ground News as they make the media landscape
more transparent by the way the markets now are had
they have increased, the betting markets have increased. Pete. Hegseth's
chances for confirmation. He's got that going for him. Let's
see here, where was I? Oh, yes, that's right, the
blue dogs and how they're totally going to win back
rural Americans. They're not. That's not gonna happen. I guess
it could. Anything could happen. So they're pitching themselves as
progressive conservatives. We're a progressive concert that's my philosophy. I'm
a progressive conservative Democrat. The term was first coined in
the late nineteenth century, so that would be the eighteen
hundreds as well as the early twentieth centuries to refer
to figures such as British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and
American President Teddy Roosevelt. So this is not a new moniker.
Perhaps no politician has better embodied progressive conservatism. According to
Jeffrey Tyler Sich, Assistant professor of political science and history
at the University of Pikeville in Kentucky, no better politician
or no politician has better embodied progressive conservatism quote unquote
than New York Democrat Daniel Patrick moynihan. Moynihan worked throughout
his long career to combine the very best elements of
the left and the right, grounded in the understanding that
quote this is what he said, that liberals are people
who would like to see things improved, and conservatives are
people who would like to see things not worsened, which
my wife and I actually the other night we watched
I don't remember the name of it, but Bill Maher's
latest stand up, And before you ask, yes, I did chuckle,
not belly laugh or guffaw, but I did chuckle I
think three times during the stand up, and this was
kind of This was one of the things that I
think he did well because it's a he's a political comedian.
He talks a lot about politics and such, and over
the last year or two he has really been laying
into the lefties because they've just gone crazy and he's
calling them out for it. And I was not aware,
but this apparently traces back to his attempt to get
solar panels on his house, and it took them three
years to get solar panels because he had to go
through all of these government agencies and stuff. So even
when he's trying to do the quote right thing by progressives,
he is still met with delays and costs and all
of that. But he had a good point when he
described conservatives as like, hey, things aren't that bad. Things
have gotten better, and let's not break things that aren't
broken just for the sake of breaking them. At the
heart of much progressive conservatism is a distrust of what
William Butler Yeats called the leveling, rancorous, rational sort of mind.
Progressive conservatives believe that human progress hinges on respecting local
custom and rejecting broad universal generalizations, whether they be in
art and faith, in the spread of democracy or the
elevation of national identity of all else, the central tenets
of progressive conservatism must become the heart and soul of
the Blue Dog's Blue Dog Democrats' agenda if they are
to succeed. He then recommends they tear a page from
the conservatives playbook and how conservatives were able to ascend
to where they have found themselves now, which is create publications,
fund all sorts of think tanks and stuff like that,
to which I say, good luck to you, Blue Dog Democrats,
good luck to you, or you could just join the Republicans.
Just say all right, that'll do it for this episode.
Thank you so much for listening. I could not do
the show without your support and the support of the
businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like,
please support them too and tell them you heard it here.
You can also become a patron at my Patreon page
or go to thepetecallanershow dot com again, thank you so
much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.