Theory 2 Action Podcast
Theory 2 Action Podcast
MM#410--Behind Closed Doors: How the 2024 Election Was Lost and Won
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The wildest presidential campaign in modern American history deserves analysis that's as gripping as the events themselves. Today we're diving into two books that attempt to make sense of the chaos: "Fight" by Jonathan Allen and Amy Parnes, and "Uncharted" by Chris Whipple.
From Biden's disastrous CNN debate where he appeared "ghostly white" and froze mid-sentence before 51 million viewers, to the frantic 107-day Harris campaign that followed, these accounts promise a behind-the-scenes look at a political earthquake. But which one delivers the goods?
While Whipple's "Uncharted" offers valuable insider access through Biden's former chief of staff Ron Klain, it ultimately reads like an extended op-ed with a clear liberal tilt. The real revelation comes from "Fight," where Allen and Parnes weave a narrative that's both balanced and brutally honest. They take us inside shocking moments like Kevin McCarthy's White House tour with Biden, where the Republican leader walked away thinking, "This guy has literally lost his mind." We see Harris's team lamenting, "There's no effing future in our message," as they struggled to differentiate from Biden while remaining shackled to his policies. And we witness Trump's strategic mastery, from his McDonald's stunt to his Silicon Valley alliances.
Key Points from the Episode:
• Comparing two major books on the 2024 election: "Uncharted" by Chris Whipple and "Fight" by Jonathan Allen and Amy Parnes
• "Uncharted" provides insider access to Biden's team but suffers from liberal bias and feels like an extended op-ed
• "Fight" delivers raw, balanced storytelling that respects readers' intelligence without picking sides
• Biden's debate disaster revealed his severe cognitive decline, with his chief of staff thinking "This is a disaster" as Biden froze on stage
• Harris's campaign struggled to establish independence from Biden, with advisors lamenting "There's no effing future in our message"
• Kevin McCarthy's White House tour with Biden revealed the president's confusion, leading McCarthy to think "This guy has literally lost his mind"
• Trump's campaign effectively connected with voters on economic issues while Democrats focused on abstract concepts
• "Fight" emerges as the superior book for understanding the 2024 election through its comprehensive and fair-minded analysis
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Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser. Flourishing life Now, here's your host, david Kaiser.
Speaker 2:Hello, I am David, and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. As is our custom, let's kick it off with the opening quote. Biden's motorcade arrived at CNN minutes before the debate began. There was no reason to be early, because he was the president of the United States, said Klain. They weren't going to start without him. Biden was introduced by the CNN anchors and stepped on to the stage On live television before an estimated 51 million viewers. The president approached his lectern an estimated 51 million viewers. The president approached his lectern. His complexion was ghostly white, like a cadaver that had been prepared for an open casket Irish wake.
Speaker 2:Biden muddled through the first 10 minutes his voice so soft it was almost a whisper. When Trump spoke, the president looked befundled. Then, at the 12-minute mark, came the moment Biden supporters had been dreading. Asked about the national debt, the president said that he was quote making sure that we were able to make every single solitary person eligible for what have been able to do with COVID. Excuse me dealing with everything we have to do with to do with COVID. Excuse me, dealing with everything we have to do with. Biden stopped. He looked lost. Then he stammered Look if we finally beat Medicare. He stared into the camera, klain swallowed hard. This is a disaster. He thought Biden had just stopped mid-sentence, inexplicably frozen. Klain couldn't help but think this is going to feed the narrative, not solve our narrative. The ordeal would continue for another two hours and six minutes. In the end Biden couldn't complete his two-minute closing summation.
Speaker 2:After word, on a small stage at Atlanta Hotel, as demoralized supporters looked on, jill Biden assured her husband that nothing was wrong. You did such a good, great job. You answered every question, she gushed. You knew all the facts. But something was terribly wrong. And that quote comes to us from Chris Whipple's Uncharted how Trump beat Biden, harris and the odds in the wildest campaign in history. And today we're going to go on a wild and chaotic ride to chart that 2024 presidential election through the lens of two books that try to make sense of it all Uncharted, which we just quoted from, by Chris Whipple, like I said, and Fight, by Jonathan Allen and Amy Parnes. Both books promise a front row seat to the drama of Biden's fall, harris's scramble and Trump's improbable comeback. But as I read them, one stood out as the sharper, more gripping tale, a story that doesn't just recount the election but makes you feel the sweat and the stakes of every misstep and triumph. And let me strongly suggest to you why fight is the one you need to pick up you, why fight is the one you need to pick up?
Speaker 2:Picture this it's early 2024 and Joe Biden's campaign is a house of cards wobbling in the wind. Before we go any further, let's just say we heard late into this podcast recording that Joe Biden has been diagnosed with a very aggressive form of cancer. We certainly will be praying for the former president and, as a Catholic, I would highly recommend that he find a confessor and spend a long time with the confessor to ensure that everything is cleaned up before things begin to get worse for him. Certainly pray that he can beat this cancer, but you always want to make sure everything is cleaned up and tidied up, uh, just in case. So, out of extreme charity, uh, one human being to another. We certainly will be praying for the former president and we'll especially be praying that he does not have a hard heart, that he goes to confession, that he receives the sacrament and that he begins to prepare. Eternal life is awaiting all of us and that is the proper and the right and the good thing to do.
Speaker 2:Now back to this 2024 campaign. Joe Biden's team knew he was struggling, he was exhausted, he was disengaged. He was barely able to string together a vision, let alone a sentence, for the second term. And the book Uncharted by Chris Whipple captures this pretty good, like a Shakespearean tragedy unfolding in real time. Whipple is the guy who gave us the gatekeepers, which was unparalleled access to Biden's inner circle. He's got Ron Klain, biden's former chief of staff, spilling the tea, admitting how Biden was falling asleep during debate prep, how Hollywood moguls such as Steven Spielberg were brought in to coach him, only to watch him crash and burn on that debate stage. It's all the juicy stuff, the kind of fly-on-the-wall detail that makes you feel like you're in the room when it happened. And Whipple paints a picture of the Democratic Party in disarray, with Kamala Harris stepping into the 107-day sprint of a campaign, but saddled with a weak vice president pick in Tim Walz and a team tearing itself apart within fighting, not to mention that their top of the ticket candidate is not the brightest bulb in the bunch. But here is where Uncharted stumbles and pretty much fails.
Speaker 2:I struggled to get through it. It was hard. It felt like you know, you just read the New York Times covering this. Chris Whipple has written a book that has a very liberal taint, that covers everything as much as 90% of mainstream media. Trump's portrayed as a cartoon villain, whiny, dangerous. At one point he compares him to George Wallace. Yes, I kid you, not George Wallace. It's not that Whipple's wrong about Trump's brash style or his legal battles, but the bias is so thick you can feel it. And at just under 204 pages and about four and a half hours it felt like a sprint itself. It was repetitive. It was leaning hard on Biden's decline without digging any deeper on why the voters had turned away from Joe Biden.
Speaker 2:Frankly, I would call this book a waste of time, like reading a long op-ed you've already seen on cable news. It's dramatic, but kind of sure, I guess. But something's missing. The broader objective and fairer lens is missing. Now, of the two books, I'm certainly going to recommend Fight. So let's talk about Fight.
Speaker 2:Jonathan Allen and Amy Parnes that's the same duo that gave us Shattered and Lucky, and they don't just tell the story of 24. They actually make you feel like you lived it and gets almost all the facts correct. Now this book is beast. It's a beast packed with details from campaign operatives on both sides, weaving a narrative that's raw and brutal and, frankly, riveting. We all watch this up close, playing out before our very eyes all the way through 2024. But Jonathan Allen and Amy Parnes spin a tale. It's storytelling at its highest level.
Speaker 2:For one of the first books out on the market after the 2024 election, I would say this one is worthy of your time. They take you into the heart of Biden's campaign, where his inner circle, jill Hunter the loyalist, clung to his candidacy, despite the obvious. They ignored the warnings even from heavyweights like Bill Clinton, who saw Trump's ads and said they were cutting through the campaign like a knife. And the Harris campaign yeah, it was a masterclass and missed opportunities and incredible fumbles. Now Allen and Parnes don't pull any punches. They show how she leaned into the vague talk about democracy while voters were screaming about gas prices and groceries. Her team even fumbled the chance to push back on Trump's jab about McDonald's jobs Ouch, ouch. But what makes the book fight shine is its balance. It doesn't pick a side for the most part and it just runs with the storytelling. Trump's campaign gets its due His knack for tapping into voter anger. His McDonald's stunt that kept the kitchen table issues front and center, his strong alliance and the master stroke with the Silicon Valley Titans like Elon Musk, and nailing the Joe Rogan interview those were all very, very good. In fact, let's go to the book for our first pull quote there, california Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, tagged along as Biden led his tour down to the White House swimming pool and to the changing rooms.
Speaker 2:What the F? Is going on? Mccarthy thought. What could be so interesting about the lockers? Biden tried the door. It was locked. He needed a Secret Service agent to unlock it. Inside there was nothing more exciting than two dressing rooms. Mccarthy, thinking he had just become a temporary staff minder for the president, prompted Biden to head back into the White House.
Speaker 2:The tour continued into a small office Biden had set up adjacent to the Oval Office with a desk, a chair and a valet. A wrinkled blue shirt hung on the valet. He pointed out a painting that he particularly liked Holy S. Mccarthy thought the president is not with it. The lawmaker wandered back into the Oval Office, effectively leading the tour out of the tighter space. With Biden's smaller desk. The president parked back up as he walked in the Oval. Kevin ask me why I have a painting of Abraham Lincoln. Biden said before answering his own question it's because we've never seen a time like this since the Civil War. Mccarthy walked out to his car that night feeling a hint of sadness. This guy has literally lost his mind, he thought to himself.
Speaker 2:Biden and his loyalists took the first option off the table. He would say publicly that Harris should do what she must to win, but privately, including in conversations with her, he repeated an admonition let there be no daylight between us, no daylight. No daylight was the phrase he had used as a vice presidential candidate in 2008 to bind Republican nominee John McCain to an unpopular President, george W Bush. Almost everywhere she went, harris walked among the former Biden aides who sought to defend his presidency. Her campaign was run by a former White House deputy chief of staff whom she had just empowered to box out her own confidence in the phalanx of department heads who had served Biden until the previous month. Later in the chapter we pick it up again.
Speaker 2:But there were limits to what the Kamala crew could do to position Harris substantively as a break from Biden. Shortly after she took the reins of the campaign, her advisors met with veteran Biden policy hands Clegg, who had worked with Harris, going back to her days in California, was shocked at the messaging materials he had seen coming from the campaign and was looking forward to engaging on the economic plans. There's no effing future in our message, he thought. Campaigns are about the future and we have no effing future economic message.
Speaker 2:Harris turned early to Brian Deese, who had spearheaded Biden's economic agenda as director of the White House National Economic Council. She trusted him from his days in the administration and wanted him to have a role quote a role whenever she was talking about the economy, said one senior Harris aide. Deese counseled that Harris should not roll out any plans that were not already in the president's budget. The stated purpose was to make sure that her promises did not score Washington. Speak for cost too much. Trump had a website full of videos promising popular policies that would run up annual deficits and the national debt by trillions of dollars, seemingly every day. He added to that pile Harris's new campaign team. The old Biden guard put on the green eye shades just when she needed to be motivating voters along the blue wall Between the Kamala Kamalot team and the veteran Biden hands. A patchwork of small bore ideas became her economic agenda.
Speaker 2:And let's face it. Even if Kamala Harris did have big ideas on the economy, she frankly just was not a strong candidate and this book details those shortcomings and droves From the people that I have talked to that have read it. They call this book 90% honest. That feels about right. It's not perfect, but it's fair. It humanizes the candidates without letting anyone off the hook, either right or left. In comparison, where Uncharted feels like a highlight reel of Biden's collapse, the book Fight is the full game tape, the and all, and I thought that is that is rewarding.
Speaker 2:Fight has the depth, the fresh antidotes, the kind of insider scoops that make you gasp, like how the dnc rigged the primaries to prop up biden only to have it backfire in their face. It's not flawless. Sometimes the sheer number of names and details can make your head spin, as we have heard when I was recounting two of those quotes, and frankly it doesn't dive deep as deep as the historical context that Chris Whipple provides in Uncharted. But Fight, the book, sticks with you. It's one of those that feels like a conversation with a friend who was in the war room, not just someone reading you the headlines.
Speaker 2:So in today's Mojo Minute, why is Fight the better book? It's simple, it respects you as the reader. It doesn't lecture you or lean too hard into one camp. It gives you the raw, unfiltered truth of the campaign that was less a race and more of a backyard brawl, and we appreciate that truth here at the Mojo Academy.
Speaker 2:Jonathan Allen and Amy Parnes don't just tell you what happened. They show you why it mattered, why Biden's team gaslit voters on the economy and why Harris couldn't connect and why Trump's gamble paid off. It's the kind of story that will keep you up at night turning the pages wondering how we even got here as a country. We even got here as a country, but as the first pass of the analysis of the 2024 race fight is worthy of your time and treasure. And if you're picking up one book to understand the wildest election in modern history, make it fight. It's just not a recount, it's a revelation. So, in Mojo Minute fashion, let's keep reading, let's keep chasing the truth and finding those nuggets of wisdom and, as always, let's keep fighting the good fight.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.