Things are even more abnormal than usual in the new episode of The New Abnormal. Hosts Molly Jong Fast and Andy Levy try to wrap their heads around the idea that maybe Mike Pence, of all people, saved the country.
“Mike Pence—who I find otherwise utterly loathsome—every day we are learning more and more that that nutjob Mike Pence may have actually saved the country? And it’s amazing to think that, because he’s completely loathsome on every other thing,” says Levy. “Given all those plans that were floating around for exactly how to overturn a fair election, it may not be overstating it to say he saved democracy in America. And I feel really weird saying that, believe me. But I'm coming around to that more and more as more and more information comes out. Am I crazy?”
“I hate this conversation and I want to die,” says Molly, “but I think you're probably right.”
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Then Rep. Ritchie Torres rejoins the pod to talk about his wild first year in Washington:
“If someone had said to me two years ago that I would become a member of Congress during an infectious disease outbreak and impeach an outgoing president and all of that would happen within the first two weeks, I would’ve said that sounds like a movie. And then if someone would’ve said to me, the Democratic Party would pass not one, not two, but three multi-trillion dollar investments in the future of our country, I would’ve said: If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. So I have been amazed by the sheer magnitude of the change that we’ve achieved in the United States.”
And Torres has some messaging advice for this party, and a warning about how easily it can lose its voters:
“First, we have to call Latinos Latino, not Latins. It’s important to address a community by the terms that it chooses,” says Torres. “You know, the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in the south Bronx are quite different from the Cubans and Venezuelans in Florida. We’re quite different from Mexicans in south Texas. And we have to be careful not to treat the Latino vote as a monolith and not to take historical constituencies of the Democratic party for granted because we can lose those constituents. And we have lost them. In New York City, a deep blue city, the Democratic party lost the Asian vote because of issues like public safety and education. And we saw that education became a losing issue for the Democrats in Virginia.”
He added: “If education becomes a losing issue for our party, we are done.”
And then Greg Sargent, who writes the Washington Post’s Plum Line blog, considers the madness of a Republican party where, “Some of them are running on an explicit promise to be willing to overturn future election losses that they hate. What is the rationale for David Perdue’s candidacy? What is it about Brian Kemp that requires a primary challenge? It’s the fact that Brian Kemp wouldn’t help Trump steal the election. And same with the primary challenger, Rep Jody Hice, who’s challenging (Georgia) Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Brad directly rebuffed Trump’s pressure on him to find 11,000 votes to overturn a legitimate election and Hice is running on the grounds that, well, if you make me secretary of state, I will overturn elections in a way that Raffensperger wouldn’t. It’s explicit.”
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