the most popular elected politician in this country is bernie sanders. yes. hard stop. yes. i mean, did you ever think that would ever be the case? no. yeah. i mean, no. [ laughter ] he s a member of no party. that s the point. and i think that is adds to his popularity. that s the irony. i know there are some democrats that wish bernie would act like a democrat. give your list to the democrat. part of his popularity is he s not. he s had spectacular success being bernie sanders over the last two years. he didn t win the democratic nomination, but who gave him any chance of even making it a competition? he lost the election, he won the campaign. yes, that s exactly right. and he s continuing to try to push that brand forward. but what that does for the democratic party at large, i don t know. let me ask the question in reverse. what does bernie sanders want? it s really i mean, it s very interesting, but i think it s what he s been saying for years and
independent. but there s this idea that democrats are feeling this new energy, i think, after the fail of health care. they re saying, you know what, let s stick to our guns. also they re facing a base, of course, that doesn t want any parts of any deal-making at all. i know, but, glenn, there s a weird die cot mchotomy for the democrats. jon ossoff, who is going to be the canary in the coal mine for the democratic party in the next two weeks, the democrat in the runoff in georgia, he s trying to say, hey, i m going to be the guy that works with all sides. you know, he knows he has to run kind of as a centrist to win that district. the messaging coming out of the democratic party is resistance at all cost. the other thing we re looking at here is the difference between the electorate and the donor base. the donor base has no patience whatsoever for democrats to be weak on this. and the other thing about it is you have a supine presidency. you have a guy who has the lowest approval
politicians on both sides of the aisle have been sticking to their guns in campaign ads for sometime now. it s sort of a six to eight year old trend like this one with west virginia joe manchin cap and trade bill. or this one featuring joni ernst taking aim at democratic policies. or this one making something blow up in the distance. the montana special house election are locked and loaded in their tv ads. democrat robb quist shoots a suber pack ad in this one. and he blows away a computer screen displaying a registry in his ad. both sides run these ads for different reasons. republicans want to show off bone a fieds and democrats want to show they are not like the other democrats. bottom line it s performance art like many things are in politics these datz. he s going to chick fill a for
understood. you know the harder slog is the senate. let them at least be involved from the beginning. i think part of it is they simply did kind of toss it to the freedom caucus to try to see what they could work out. yeah. we know the history of presidents letting congress go ahead with things. good luck with that. they don t work very well. let me go to the border wall. mick mulvaney, the budget director, has this idea. let s do a little old-fashioned horse trading. you give us a little border wall. come on, democrats. what do you want? are democrats in a negotiating mood? democrats are not in a negotiating mood. every conversation i ve had are them kind of going even further to the left. this idea that they re seeing that they can have leverage with this president mainly because he hasn t really accomplished much. because of that, they re saying let s work on getting our party a new fresh face. you see bernie sanders back on the campaign trail, kind of barnstorming the