The Bulwark Podcast

former Republican strategist, advisor at the Lincoln Project, author of numerous books, including his latest, The Conspiracy to End America, and my favorite, The Last Season, A Father, Son, and a Lifetime of College Football.

author of numerous books, including his latest, The Conspiracy to End America

author of numerous books, including his latest, The Conspiracy to End America, and my favorite, The Last Season, A Father, Son, and a Lifetime of College Football.

I wrote a book about the Bush campaign, The Big Enchilada, and I actually predicted in that book that Liz would run for president.

There's a fascinating book called Rising Tide. There's a lot of books called Rising Tide. But there's a Rising Tide that analyzes the impact of Joe Namath on the University of Alabama's racial segregation history. And its premise, and it makes a lot of sense to me, is Joe Namath came from this small integrated steel mill town. He was the coolest guy on campus by far. It was not cool to be racist around Joe Namath.

It's Losers by Michael Lewis, which actually Scott Conroy, who wrote Sarah from Alaska, recommended to me when I said I have this homework assignment, I'm going to read a bunch of political books. He was like, you have to read Losers by Michael Lewis. It's about the 96 campaign and all the Losers, all the losing candidates, and just what it's like to be on the campaign trail for somebody that is hopeless.

And I just think Michael Lewis is kind of just perspective as an outsider. So good because he was not burdened by being a political reporter and having to do drinks with these people and have sources and have relationships.

Coming from outside of politics, I think he gave a very fresh view on just how empty our political campaigns are. And it's both a character portrait of a lot of these Losers, but also a critique of the way we do campaigns.

I thought Michael Lewis' Losers was fantastic.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 1972 by Hunter S. Thompson has to be on The Mount Rushmore.

And I'm sure somebody will reply with, well, Tim, you had to include this or that. But to me, I kept coming back to, I loved the political education by Harry McPherson.

He was a longtime staffer to LBJ.

And his book is about the Senate and the LBJ presidency and the civil rights fight and what was happening in DC at that time.

I think it's such an interesting first-person perspective on that tumultuous time and those characters and what their real views were on race and navigating these fragile coalitions.

I've had Mark Leibovich on this podcast. I love this town. That's not really about campaigns.

I read all of them. I read all the Game Changes. I read Double Down. John Halliman has been on this podcast, wrote Game Change with Mark Halperin. But let's just be honest, Halliman did most of the writing.

He does a good job. He's a good writer.

My buddy Scott Conroy wrote Sarah from Alaska about that same 2008 campaign, which is really good and didn't get maybe the plot it deserved because his portrait of Sarah Palin I think was very, very rich if that's something that interests you.

You know that book Strangers in Their Own Land?

I haven't read it, but I kind of I know the thesis.

Yeah, you know the thesis.

Yeah.

I should read her con man book.

She's also the author of the book All Joy and No Fun, The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. And she was a finalist for the Pulitzer, no big deal, for a 2023 piece about her aunt Adele, The Ones We Sent Away.

The 2022 Pulitzer was for a piece published in 2021. It's always a little deceptive. You win whatever year Pulitzer for something you wrote the previous year.

And by the way, the piece that I wrote that was a finalist, it shipped out in June of 2023. That is one year to work on one piece. I mean, that's crazy. That's one third the number of long pieces that I'd done the year before.

And we might not actually get to your antebellum, you might storm off the podcast when I ask you this question. But I feel like it's important because if I have this, this bad thought in my head, then some percentage of listeners probably have this bad thought in their head.

And I think it was just totally bittersweet for her. I think like the sense that it happened so late in her life that she had to be, what, 76? You know, for this to happen. You like to think that your journalism is doing a good thing.

I did a fun podcast with Kurt Goldsberry about his new book Hoop Atlas.

There's a great book called The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Heinrich, which points out that many biases and mindsets and frameworks that we have to think about what the self is and whether we owe our alliances more to the law or our family, that many of these ideas that seem normal are actually extraordinarily Western and sometimes even uniquely American.

And your book, Game Changers, like so central to that time, and accompanying film.

And the things that we wrote about that were things that made her that were clownish, but there were also signs of how manifestly unqualified she was to be vice president, let alone president.

I don't think the book, fairly speaking, the book was not John McCain is like an avatar of like principal and going high. And she was going low.

I just think it's like Liz Cheney's book about the entire TikTok of what happened, the insurrection and Tim Alberto's book about evangelicals, the Kingdom, the Power and the...

She moved to Italy and did an eat, pray, love thing and met a boy and decided to stay there.

Jim Comey has a new crime novel out called Westport. It's his second novel. He also wrote Central Park West.

Then he wrote his first book, a memoir about the craziness that is his life called A Higher Loyalty, Truth, Lies and Leadership.

Jim Comey has a new crime novel out called Westport. It's his second novel. He also wrote Central Park West.