 Aloha. This is Think Tech Hawaii. And this is the show Politics for the People. I'm your host, Stephanie Soul Dalton. And our topic is how Biden can build back better for his presidency and save it from the currently descending poll numbers and rising disapproval ratings. Welcome also to the panelists who are our guests today to join in the discussion of this issue. And that we wanna say hello to Jay Fidel and Tim Appichella and Winston Welch. So welcome to the program and being on the panel. Now, moving on to our questions for the day to start that discussion, Jay Fidel, you know, Biden's first year ratings seem to more reflect his misses and ignore his gains. But what does he do now with this feedback that he has from the polls and the disapproval data? So can you tell us what you're thinking about this and what he can do? Well, I start by saying it's a combination of his own mistakes, which is hard to get away from and Republicans attacking him. And those two things, you know, they interact and make it hard for him. And some of his appointees aren't working well. You know, I get Merrick Garland who manages to spend more time making decisions that you and I and my puppy can make almost immediately. And he takes weeks, months to do it. Really remarkable. I'm not sure that Tony Blinken is doing what I would want him to do in terms of foreign policy. And there was an article recently by Ron Klain who I thought was a really good pick. Maybe he's not so good a pick. So Blinken has surrounded him. So then, of course, he's really vice presidential in his approach to things. And he's going to kind of work it all out. And now after a year of being beat up and undermined by the GOPs, he's realizing that you can't negotiate somebody who has determined not to negotiate with you. I mean, any first year lawyer could tell you that. So I don't know if there's anything much he can do because it's a momentum now. It defines his presidency. A year is a long honeymoon. If he were going to change his approach, his style, he would become stronger or consistent. He would get his cabinet to be stronger, more consistent. And he would generally act in a more affirmative leadership way. One of the things that was in the article, I think Winston said around this morning, which I was very impressed, was that they, that's Biden and his administration, as well as all of us have to cope with people on the other side of the spectrum, the aisles, who are determined to bring him down and bring the country down. This is very hard to do because the old techniques, the old strategies don't really apply. He has to be stronger than he might have otherwise been. He has to take more affirmative stances. He has to deal with pathological people, who are taking pathological positions. This is hard for anyone, any one of us, but it's especially hard for him because it's not his style. We know his style is not like that at all. So he's got to learn on the job, he's got to learn soon, he's got to learn now that his whole orientation has to be different. He has to speak truth to power. He has to take steps to argue back. He has to make it clear that he's on the high road. He has to tell us what we already know. He has to repeat what he said, just like a Republican stew. And he has to speak to people who are very hard to speak to. And finally, this is my biggest point of all, if he wants to recover his administration, he's got to develop a democratic party infrastructure around the country. He's got to activate anyone who would claim to be in a democratic party and be part of his organization. And I guess one last point is, frankly, he's got to find somebody, maybe a couple of people who will be on the democratic ticket for 2024. He should not run. He should get somebody else to run and he should do that right away. Okay, okay, thank you. You know, the feedback Tim is pretty harsh in the polls. I mean, he's fallen almost as low as Trump and in patterns that are different from other presidents. What do you think about the feedback he's getting in the polls? Is that quality that Biden really ought to be paying attention to? Can you talk a little bit about how he might be processing all of this? Because he certainly has a lot of advice on the other side too, so yes. Yeah, he said he wasn't going to run his presidency based on polling. And I agree with that position. However, Georgia just came out with a polling of his favorability rate. He's gone from 60, 61 down to 33. That's pretty bad. So you may not run your presidency based on polling, but you better listen to it and figure out what you're doing wrong. And I agree with Jay, he's got to take steps. But steps I think is actions and he needs to take actions. And one of the first actions is he's got to get his own party unified and they're not. And particularly that was with Joe Manchin in cinema. That's a disaster that's taken place and that has egg all over his face. And that's part of the reason why he has dropped in the polling. I think in African-Americans in Georgia have lost confidence in Biden and that's why his poll numbers are suffering the way they are. He's got a long road to come back up on and that is not easy once you're this far down but he can do it. And I think he can do it in a couple of ways. One, they've got to stop coming in with the whole enchilada concept when they bring bills to the floor. You know, I think the build back better was the whole enchilada and the kitchen sink too. And you got to stop that approach. You've got to get buy off a consensus on each portion of a bill that you want to bring in and maybe you do break it up. I know he thought he didn't have much time and that the 2022 midterm elections would come and break up his ability to get anything done. But by bringing in such large packages for legislation that didn't work for him. That strategy has failed. So I would go back to Joe Manchin and send him on, say, look, let's break up BBB. Let's find something that we can all agree on. Yeah, we're not getting 3 point trillion. We're not getting the 1.75 trillion. Let's settle on 900, 950 billion of programs that you can live with and the country will benefit from. And then you go to voting. You go to, again, some minuscule modification of the filibuster. And then you try to get Republicans on that too. I don't think he's done a whole lot on reaching out to Republicans, certainly according to Mitt Romney, that he reached out for him and tried to bring him over. So he needs to start on those two bills that have stalled and get going on that quick. And then some new initiatives. But he's not going to build back his numbers if he doesn't get something going. Good points. I think I'm hearing he needs to be more flexible in his legislating plans. And do you think that he's mimicking Obama in terms of going in with big things and has that experience to draw on? Yeah, I think that's what he has been doing. Again, I don't blame him for what he was trying to do because he knows that he was going to lose the House in 2022, probably, and he thought, this is it. I got one year to get this stuff done, a year and a half. And so he went for it. He went for the whole thing and didn't work out. So now he's got to salvage his attempt and get that which he can get done before the midterm elections. And who knows if he does get something done that people like. Maybe he can salvage the 2022 midterm vote. OK. I'm starting to hear Joe Biden's name in the same sentence as Jimmy Carter. And that's not good. This is not good, yeah. Well, thank you. That's a very sad point to end the comment on. But we can get back to it. And Winston, I was wanting you to talk about whether he should do something about this. So this is the Supreme Court nomination. I just have to ask it. It just came up last night. So now that we have this new Supreme Court nomination, do you see in that process that he's going to go through any opportunities for him to score or not? How is that maybe going to work for him? Excuse me, in light of what Tim is saying. Well, I think her is right and him. Because he already, this is just a check that he wrote that's being cashed now. Obviously, there was some. Stephen Ryder was looking at what happened with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and decided he needed to retire now, rather than have this come up. But that said a lot of, she was very important in her decisions and her reasonings in the last years of her life. So these justices control when they are going to resign, or if they indeed die in office. So the thing is, as soon as they announce this, the second they announce, the media, they're already done. And the media is all over it. What I thought was interesting, though, was that there wasn't a squawk from the Republicans. Lindsey Graham gave some little minor thing that says, oh, I suppose it'll happen because Joe Biden controls the process now. Well, he's not been able to pass his build back better or whatever legislation he's wanted to get because of a system and mention. But apparently they're going to go for be part of this 50-vote block plus Kamala Harris to push any nomination he has over the line. And of course, he's already promised this to a African-American woman. And I think that it's in the same way that he did for his vice presidential nomination. So that check was already written at some level. And he's just catching it now. I don't know that it will score points. Maybe it will. But his reasoning behind it was that the Supreme Court should look more like America. So in that regard, he's making this slow, steady progress. And Americans don't like slow, steady progress. They've become accustomed to loud, noisy distraction and seemingly random decisions that just have chaos everywhere because maybe I don't know it's more entertaining or it's just exhausting to follow. I'm not sure what that was. But Joe Biden is not that fellow. Given that reality of that Americans have a 30-second sound bite, not even 30 seconds, it's still the next TikTok comes in. I don't think it's 30 seconds long. He needs to send out his legion of very competent, qualified, democratic spokespeople in his cabinet, the Pete Booty judges, the Kamala Harrises, whoever, the Amy Klobuchar, who aren't in his cabinet that want to be there. They need to get Governor Newsom out there and putting forth the democratic message and not even the Democratic with a big D, the Democratic with a small D. And in that, as Tim was saying or Jay was saying, that he needs to reach out to the Mitt Romney's and the other folks and say, hey, you write this legislation. Let's see what you can come up with. If you're really intent on salvaging our nation as we understand it to be. And I think Mitt Romney could be counted. And not in a lot of people with an R after their name could be counted on that. Let them start writing this legislation, breaking the chains that they're bound to right now, seemingly, because they don't want to be beholded to one man or one person who controls that party at this point. Yeah, I'm glad that you got back to that because in saying he's gonna push this nomination through based on the tie and the Kamala Harris vote. But he's obviously just on the razor's edge now. And why is it that cinema will necessarily go along with this? Did you all see Winston that the Republicans were all shaking hands with her? They did a zoom in with the little light at the end of the vote. And the Republic, she was standing there in the back of the door and they were all coming up and shaking her hand. So why is she gonna go along with this Supreme Court nomination? You think this one? That's a good question. And I don't know that she will. I mean, really, she and Joe Manchin could very easily have an R after their name or if they wanted to make it more politically correct or flexible, an I for independent. But essentially, she says certain things about voting rights and yet she's not delivering. So she's really serious about those sorts of issues. Let her write the legislation that she can feels that she can get passed with her Republican friends and reach out across the aisle for something that's common sense that everybody can support. I don't know that it would not surprise me as she voted against the candidates at least the initial ones had been proffered. We don't know who's actually going to be nominated to take this place. But let's just assume and hope and pray that it's somebody that she would be unwise to go against and that this person, that the qualifications will be impeccable. And I mean, look how fast you had. Nobody wants another Brent Kavanaugh situation to come in. Look how fast Amy Comey Barrett went in. I think probably the Republicans realized it doesn't matter who they put in there. We still have six to three and that's not gonna change. Well, that's interesting. Thank you. Well, Jay, let's switch over now with Maiden's dilemma to look at the international side of it. What is the game that Putin is playing and is he gonna play it? And which way into Ukraine or back off? What do you think is gonna happen and what should Biden do? I believe he's gonna take Ukraine without firing a shot. I think he's gonna use cyber attacks on Ukraine. He's gonna use political gambits on Ukraine. He's gonna undermine Zelensky. He's gonna use Germany and the rest of the EU in a kind of propaganda war. And he's gonna essentially undermine the Ukraine government till the point where he gets to control it without firing a shot. Let's see what happens. You guys can bet me a pizza on that. There'll be no war. He's a very smart, very clever guy and he has all kinds of tools in his toolkit. And he's playing Biden. He's playing Blinken. I mean, this goes back to your first question. That they are likely to be embarrassed here. They're likely to wind up with they on their face somehow because he's gonna outsmart them and he's very clever, very brutal. But let me go back to some of the other points that have been discussed this morning. And that is, for example, on the Stephen Breyer replacement, yeah, first of all, my view of cinema and mansion is that they are Republican operatives. There's a deal there. And they have done a marvelous job in screwing up Biden. They've made him wait, they've made him look bad and the result, the outcome has been awful. They've done a just remarkable job. You gotta hand it to them as Republican operatives. They really do have ours next to their names and that's not gonna change. Okay, so then you bring in a replacement for Stephen Breyer. I believe he should have retired a long time ago. He should have given Biden more time. Now Biden is up against a change in Congress on 2022. He'll be less powerful after November. But I think the Republicans are gonna do everything they can possibly do in the current configuration of Congress to stop that nomination. And then if they win the Senate, which I think they will win the Senate starting 2023, there'll be no Biden candidate who's gonna get through. But even now, I don't think a Biden candidate is gonna get through. They're gonna find something wrong with them. They're gonna concoct, you're gonna cook up something or her and there's gonna be a fight on every candidate. There's gonna be delay tactics on every candidate. And this is not only to stop one relatively inconsequential member of the court because it's still gonna be the six to three. It's to make Biden look bad, make the Democrats look bad, undermine their influence, their authority, their popularity. That's what's gonna happen on the Supreme Court. I feel pretty clear about that. And the other thing is, you talk about, everybody has ideas, including that article you sent around this morning, which was so impressive when it said about what can be done. The reality is not much can be done. You can't change the way Biden operates and you can't cast off the mistakes he's made. It's A, very likely he's gonna continue to make mistakes. B, it is very likely that the Republicans are going to attack everything he does. And C, the party is fragmented. The fragmentation was a real undermine for the Build Back Better bill. They were fighting among themselves. I don't know how that's gonna change. You need a strong leader who bat heads and he doesn't qualify for that. So I think we're gonna have more of the same. It's gonna continue, his ratings are gonna be low. And that's why I say the only way out of this little trap that Trump set for him, which is playing out now, is for him to pick a ticket. The regrettable thing there is there's nobody, nobody visibly capable of doing that. And I don't know where that person comes from. But then we do have 330 million people. There must be somebody in the crowd who would qualify. Stephanie, have you thought about this? Well, I like Buttigieg. I mean, there are numbers of them. I think you're right. There are among them. I mean, have you thought about running? That have thought about running? Have you thought about running? Oh, yes, certainly. I wanna be the first female president. I think I can pass on that, but I certainly know other people that would be willing to take it on. But I think in that wonderful article, I don't know if you're referring to the one Winston sent that was the seven points of how to... That's the one. Yeah, yeah. So I know that Tim responded to it and I did too. And I wanted to go back and have a chance to just talk about that a little bit too, Tim. So I think that what Jay is saying to us is that he's not expecting a big change for buying to do a huge shift. And that would mean not a shift in his rhetoric, okay? Because that's one of the things that counts according to that discussion, that piece, and it's discussion of how to sustain democracy and interfere with the authoritarianism or autocracy. So one of the things is maybe he could... He looks like he's trying to ramp up the rhetoric. Let me know if you agree with me about that. But the other one to talk about too is if he can ramp up the rhetoric to the point of getting attention paid and being dignified. Can he play the judo? The point of the judo where the game rules are changed so that the advantages of what... Are you asking me this question or Tim? I was gonna shift it over to Tim. But do you have something to say about this? Yeah, the answer is no, he can't. It's not in his DNA. He's not like that. He's had decades and decades of experience in government. We know his movie. We know how he operates. And he's not gonna be able to change his spots. I'm sorry. So that just supports my view that this is gonna continue lurching from crisis to crisis. And he's not capable of getting it resolved. And furthermore, I would go back to something Tim said. The rhetoric is one thing, but you really have to have outcomes, scores. You have to have successes. And query whether he's able to do that. Well, Tim... Oh, Stephanie, I just saw Don't Look Up movie last night. And I feel like this conversation is synonymous with a big meteorite hurling towards Earth for its destruction, or in this case, Biden's administration. I don't quite take on Jay's viewpoint on some of the stuff. And I guess I'll just go with Manchin and Sinema putting an R by their name. I suppose we'll find out exactly where they stand when it comes to this Supreme Court nominee. And in the old finance business and institutional investing, there's an old saying, the trend is your friend. So if you had both those senators, Nick's build back better and the voting rights. And then if they nick the nomination that Joe Biden wants, then I would say that's a trend. And that would put some weight behind Jay's words that they really should run as independents in the future because they're certainly not going along with the Democratic Party. Yeah, well, I see you're saying in the future. Okay, because to change over from their position now is they lose power, Tim. So... Yeah, I know that, yeah. And so they're not going to. But if Biden and administration and all the other Democrats want to see them as their fellow colleagues, that may be difficult if they buck the nominations, the nominee that Joe Biden wants to set forth. So it's up to them. And then the bottom line is Joe Biden's in trouble, but I don't think, I think he can reverse things. I think he's got still a very good staff that and Joe Biden does listen to people. I think that's a good quality that President Biden has versus President Trump. He actually will listen to the people he's surrounded himself with. And I think they can turn this around. But again, without accomplishments, forget it. He's going to be a lame duck. And I also disagree with a little bit with Jay about finding someone on the ticket for the next term. That would telegraph to everybody that he's a lame duck for the next three years. And I don't think he needs that. That's good. He may play these exercises in his mind and do a little on the back of a napkin on who he thinks should take over, but certainly not making any overtures or even any conversations with anybody about it because Washington D.C. leaks like a sieve. And you don't want that to leak out because then he will be a lame duck. Yeah, well, those are good comments. Thank you. Winston, I wanted to just jump back to the judo question where the GOP has been so successful with, in using the benefits and advantages of democracy against itself, which they've done over and over again. So can you talk about whether Biden has the capacity to maybe move into doing some of that himself? I mean, that's a pretty complicated game if you don't know it, but can he start to play something like that and would that help? Well, for our gentle viewers who may be wondering where the article that we're talking about, it was written by Tri-Giv Olson, the founder of... Tri-Giv, Tri-Giv. Tri-Giv. Okay, he's a senior... Tri-Giv, Tri-Giv Olson. He's senior advisor to the Lincoln Project. This is not a radical Democrat, right? He worked for senior levels of Republican politics and spent two decades training people from 40 countries, struggling to build democracies for the International Republican Institute, which was led by the late Senator John McCain. So this is not a radical leftist... And the name of the article that he wrote for the Lincoln Project is What Can I Do? Seven rules for defending our democracy. It's an interesting read. It's an important read. It's one of many out there that just says, what can I do? What can we do? You know, look, Joe Biden is our president. He's a decent man. He will make mistakes. He's entitled to make mistakes. He's also entitled to change direction and change his mind and pivot to where he can see the best advantages. He knows where he's at. In some ways, you know, given that we're so prone to the, as I mentioned before, this five second rule, you know, about our attention span, he may be here ending up stronger in the long run because he is the tortoise. And we're not seeing all the things that he'd done, but he actually, when I was reading about the nominations for the Supreme Court, he's had more folks appointed there than any of the president in recent memory. The judges, for the Supreme Court. Judges. And I think I read that 80% of them are women and over half were people of color. So he is, you know, moving forward, he's getting work done. It's not glamorous, sexy, noisy, splashy, chaotic, traumatic. It's just getting the work of government done. That doesn't sell very well being, you know, the postal delivery man, but you don't, you try not having the postal delivery man. That's basically what we had for the last, you know, four years before that and it's chaos. And so he is, the post, not delivery man, the postal letter carrier. Sorry, sorry for my slip, but basically sometimes my postal letter carries a man and sometimes a woman. So anyway, the point is that Joe Biden, he is going to, he's our president for the next three years, barring some disaster. And I agree 100% with what Tim said, he should not endorse or suggest that he's not going to run again until maybe, you know, June or March of that election year, if that were the case. And if I were him, I wouldn't endorse anybody. I would throw it open and see who rises to the top for the masses and who's going to be the strongest candidate. And I think that's what he would do. Well, we're out of time. So what I'd like to do is wrap up with just really brief comments just going around the three of you. So why don't we start with Jay and then just finish up with a closing comment for this topic. Thank you, Jay. Well, yeah, I don't think that putting a candidate forward and take it forward, it should happen immediately, but it should happen soon. And I would say sooner than the year of the election. That's too late. But I don't think he's going to make it. If you just look at the way he walks and talks, he doesn't have the strength that he had a year ago. So we need somebody who is apparently strong. That's one thing. The other thing is all the advice we're getting about what to do, it's very hard to avoid the noise. I get, for example, hundreds of requests every day for money from all these organizations. And I have learned to be suspicious of them. I have learned to be suspicious on a wolf in sheep's clothing. And I have learned to be suspicious of organizations which are out there raising money for their own pockets. I have learned to be suspicious about organizations which don't really represent the people they say they're representing and so forth. I wish that somebody could emerge as an organization. They all want money, right? As an organization that could actually do some stuff with that money. But there are so many of them that I can't trust a lot of them. And maybe Vladimir Putin is putting some of those out there on the internet too. You can't overlook that possibility. So what I'm saying is if there was an organization that emerged as a legitimate representative of the Democratic Party and of these principles, that would help. So far, it hasn't happened. Okay, thank you. Tim, wrap up briefly. When I think about what came before Joe Biden was Trump and what could come after Joe Biden as far as a GOP candidate, I'm reminded of an old Turkish proverb. And that is when a clown moves into the palace, the clown doesn't become a king, the palace becomes a circus. And I don't care who's there on the Democratic ticket for Joe Biden or after Joe Biden, it's gonna be a whole lot better than what's lined up as potential candidates in the GOP party because the GOP party has disintegrated into a laughing stock, into a circus itself. So no matter what it is, who it is, it's gonna be 10 times better than any candidate the GOP could put up there. Interesting point. Thank you, Tim. Winston, final comment. Oh, I love that quote, Tim. That's really good, that proverb from Turkey. Yeah, maybe, who knows? Maybe the Republicans will snap out of it and they'll realize that they need to reclaim their party, their principled conservative party, which moves towards the center. And maybe they'll run someone like the governor of the Maryland or someone who is not prone to histrionics and who is a principled Republican, conservative person who seems like, okay, we can deal with this fellow. And maybe, like Tim said, the Democrats could do the same. They just choose someone who is a moderate person appealing to the majority of voters across the spectrum so that we can continue to have a sane, stable, adult person in the White House surrounded by competent, clear thinking, rational and kind humans. And let's hope for the best there. And I still wanna have faith in our country, men and women that we can make those right choices. It's a matter of all of us educating ourselves and each other and making the right choices. Very good, thank you. We are out of time and thank you, Jay. My down, Tim Apichella and Winston Welch for participating today in this discussion. And thank you viewers for viewing. And this show will be on again next week. We'll see you then, Aloha and Mahalo.