Kairoticast

Elizabeth can’t be with you this week due to illness. But reach out to her at elizabeth@kairoticast.com, comment here, or find her on twitter at @kairoticast! She’ll be with you again, soon. [Read More]

I was Zooming with some friends, and one of them said something about not having an opinion on the electoral college and I said, “Oh, I can help you with that, it’s garbage.” And she laughed and said, “Okay, well, that clears that up.” And then they were like, “no, seriously, how does it work, how can you win the popular vote but lose the election?” And I started explaining a few things and sharing some anecdata and they were like, “No. HOW IS THAT ACCURATE?” And one of them said “You should do a podcast about the electoral college and I said, “well, I talked about it some when I talked about the Southern Strategy,” and they said, “No, it needs a whole episode.” [Read More]

We’re just coming off of the Thanksgiving holiday, and I’m wondering how yours went. I say that because we all know the jokes and the tropes about Thanksgiving. It’s supposed to be this delightful family time but supposedly it devolves into families arguing about politics. Apparently, everybody has a crazy, conspiracy-nut uncle, a racist grandma, or a brother-in-law who thinks we should be using the homeless as unpaid labor. Or, perhaps, some people come at this from a different angle – you have a crazy, hippy-dippy cousin who won’t vaccinate her kids, a socialist uncle who thinks everything should be free, and a niece who won’t eat anything at the table because it wasn’t ethically sourced or it isn’t cruelty free. Regardless, family is complicated and according to the jokes and stories we tell Thanksgiving is just a hotbed of familial tension because we all disagree on the fundamentals of well, everything, and can’t put that aside for a few hours for one day a year. [Read More]

In an interview with Anand Giridharadas Chuck Schumer said that he was looking for Joe Biden to have a First 100 Days like Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s.

Democrats, in many ways, look to FDR as the gold standard of Democrats. He was probably the most popular Democrat ever (I mean, he got elected four times!), he got us out of the Great Depression, his programs are some of the most popular and enduring of any programs ever. He certainly had his flaws – nobody is forgetting the internment camps – but FDR style leadership and economics set the bar for what Democrats would and should be for decades to come. So when Schumer, and others, say they want Joe Biden to have an FDR style presidency, they are making a comment about a number of things: [Read More]