In normal times, if one party is bad at politics, it’s a problem for that party. But in these times, we only have one major party that still believes in democracy.
And yet Democrats are likely to lose the Congress this fall, and could lose the White House in 2024 — maybe even to Donald Trump, the first US president ever to lead a coup attempt and still the leader of a Republican Party that has abandoned principles for the pursuit of power.
So it’s not just Democrats who need the Democratic Party to remember how to win elections. Democracy does.
Spencer Critchley’s guest this time has some great ideas on where to start, based on his unique, decades-long experience studying politics from the inside and out.
Walter Shapiro has reported on 11 presidential campaigns, going back to Ronald Reagan’s landslide defeat of Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Among other national publications, he’s written for the Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, USA Today, Roll Call, and The New Republic. His book One-Car Caravan covered the 2004 Democratic primary campaigns.
Walter was a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, and a top assistant to Carter’s Secretary of Labor, Ray Marshall. He teaches politics at Yale, and is a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice.
And he’s run for office himself, leaving graduate studies in history at the University of Michigan to campaign for Congress at the age of 25. He finished second among six contenders, and jokes that he’s still demanding a recount.
You’ll learn more about his fascinating background during this interview, including a story about his great-uncle and Adolf Hitler that you’re really going to want to stick around for.
Like millions of other people, Spencer has been reading and learning from Walter Shapiro’s reporting for a long time, but it was a recent piece in Roll Call that made him eager to talk to him now. Starting in on the Democrats’ latest attempt at a snappy slogan, Walter diagnoses their chronic difficulty with persuading people to vote for them, even when their policies are popular – even when their opponents are trying to destroy democracy. We begin there, and range far and wide.
Links
“Biden’s ‘MAGA Republicans’ is a meh-ga slogan: Democrats are ensnared in the campaign consultant trap,” by Walter Shapiro, Roll Call, May 17, 2022.
One-Car Caravan: On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In, by Walter Shapiro
Hustling Hitler: The Jewish Vaudevillian Who Fooled the Fuhrer, by Walter Shapiro
Walter Shapiro page at The New Republic
Walter Shapiro page at Roll Call
About Walter Shapiro
Award-winning journalist, Walter Shapiro has covered 11 presidential campaigns and is a staff writer for the New Republic. He is also a lecturer in political science at Yale (since 2013) and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU (since 2014). In addition, he is a columnist for the Capitol Hill publication, Roll Call (since 2016).
His roster of presidential campaigns: 1980 (Washington Post); 1984 (Newsweek); 1988 and 1992 (Time where he covered the Bill Clinton campaign); 1996, 2000 and 2004 (USA Today columnist); 2008 (Washington bureau chief for Salon); 2012 (Yahoo News columnist and Special Correspondent for The New Republic) and 2016 (Roll Call columnist).
He has written two books. In 2003, he wrote One Car Caravan: On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In. This was a chronicle of the early skirmishing for the 2004 Democratic nomination — the last year before 2020 that the Democrats had a completely wide-open presidential race.
In 2016, he published Hustling Hitler: The Jewish Vaudevillian Who Fooled the Fuhrer, which has been optioned to become a Broadway musical. This was the story of his con-man great-uncle, Freeman Bernstein, who was a cigar-smoking vaudeville agent, boxing manager, horse-race fixer, jewel smuggler and scam artist. Freeman’s greatest hustle was selling the Nazis in 1936 200 tons of bogus Canadian nickel (a war material) that turned out to be scrap metal.
Shapiro served in the Jimmy Carter administration as a White House speechwriter and as a top assistant to the Secretary of Labor. As a 25-year-old, Shapiro ran for Congress from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and finished second in a six-way primary. More than four decades later, he is still demanding a recount.
After growing up in Norwalk, Connecticut, he attended the University of Michigan where he received a BA degree. He returned to do graduate work in history but left after three semesters to run for Congress.
For more than a decade from 1995-2007, Shapiro performed stand-up comedy at top clubs in New York. While not all reviews were glittering, The Times of London called him “one of New York’s best satirists.” Shapiro insists that he is not retired as a comic but merely is “between engagements.”
Shapiro’s early journalistic jobs in Washington were as a reporter with Congressional Quarterly and as an editor of the Washington Monthly, where he remains a Contributing Editor.
Shapiro divides his time between his home in Manhattan and his reporting rounds in Washington. He is married to biographer Meryl Gordon (Mrs. Astor Regrets and Bunny Mellon: The Life of an America Style Legend).