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Shannon Watts: How to create an ‘army of angry moms and women’ from your own kitchen Aug 07, 2018

Show notes

The founder of Moms Demand Action talks about how she created one of the most successful gun control groups in the country—and where they go from here.

Shannon Watts has a bodyguard who travels with her. He doesn’t carry a gun—his job is to scope out the local hospitals and know which one to rush her to if she gets shot. That’s been life for the mother of five since late 2012, when she founded Moms Demand Action, an organization that advocates for stricter regulation of guns. Watts says the threats of violence and rape started coming in within 24 hours of the group’s formation. Threatening strangers have shown up at her house. The National Rifle Association regularly features her in its magazine. Right-wing provocateur Dana Loesch, before she went on the NRA payroll, showed up with a camera crew to confront Watts off-guard at a protest she was leading near the NRA’s annual meeting. It all started that day in December 2012 when 20 first-graders were mowed down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, and a frustrated Watts wrote a Facebook post about the need for new gun laws. She figured she’d just join a group that existed—something like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, except for gun violence—sign up for a few events, write a check. Instead, sitting at her kitchen table and almost without realizing what she was doing while talking with the fellow mothers who reached out to her, Watts started what has quickly become one of the largest and most far-reaching organizations in American politics and an aspirational model for how a group of like-minded political amateurs can quickly move from liking each others’ social media posts to having a real impact on policy.

For more: https://www.politico.com/podcasts/off-message

Politico's "Off Message" podcast is hosted by Edward-Isaac Dovere, produced by Zack Stanton, and is a proud member of the Panoply network. Intro/outro music by Podington Bear.

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John Dean: Nixon ‘might have survived if there'd been a Fox News’ — Reprise Jul 31, 2018

Show notes

This week, an encore presentation of an interview we first brought you earlier this year. John Dean was the star witness of the Watergate investigation — the counsel to President Richard Nixon who famously flipped and became the prosecution’s star witness in the process that helped take down the president. The Russia scandal is far from over, said Dean, but Trump has advantages that Nixon didn’t.

“There’s social media, there’s the internet; the news cycles are faster. I think Watergate would have occurred at a much more accelerated speed than the 928 days it took to go from the arrest at the Watergate to the conviction of Haldeman and Ehrlichman and [John] Mitchell, et al.,” Dean told Off Message host Isaac Dovere in our first episode of 2018. “There’s more likelihood [Nixon] might have survived if there’d been a Fox News.”

POLITICO's Off Message podcast is hosted by Isaac Dovere and is part of the Panoply network. Zack Stanton is its producer. Theme music by Podington Bear.

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Marty Walsh: Working-class Trump voters ‘forgot where they came from’ Jul 24, 2018

Show notes

Marty Walsh is a college drop-out and recovering alcoholic who grew up in a union household and worked his way up through organized labor and local politics. In many ways, he fits the profile of the kind of white working-class man who put Donald Trump in the White House.

He also happens to be the Democratic mayor of Boston, and he has a bracing assessment of the blue-collar white voters backing Trump: They “forgot where they came from.”

Walsh says it bothers him how many of the people he grew up with and worked with—or fit that same profile all around the country—support Trump policies. And he talks about what Democrats can do to turn things around.

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Francis Suarez: Miami's almost-millennial, Latino mayor doesn't like labels Jul 17, 2018

Show notes

Francis Suarez believes he may be the first Miami-born mayor of Miami. He also has a front-row seat to his swing state's senate and gubernatorial races. He didn't vote for Trump, but Mar-a-Lago isn't far.

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Kate Andersen Brower: Making sense of the Trump-Pence relationship Jul 10, 2018

Show notes

How does Mike Pence keep his boss happy? By staying out of the spotlight, for starters, says journalist Kate Andersen Brower, whose new book looks at the relationships between presidents and their vice presidents. She describes the Trump-Pence dynamic, and sizes up how Pence compares to his predecessor in the job, Joe Biden.

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Tom Arnold: 'Donald Trump is a D-list president, and his enemies are D-list, like Tom Arnold' Jul 03, 2018

Show notes

Tom Arnold talks about his hunt for Trump tapes, his selfie with Michael Cohen, and the mad coincidences that have injected him into a handful of political scandals.

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Seth Moulton: ‘We have a commander in chief that we fundamentally can’t trust.’ Jun 26, 2018

Show notes

Congressman Seth Moulton is amassing an army of service-oriented Democratic candidates. His goal isn’t simply to defeat Trump; it’s to change politics — and maybe form his own national campaign in the process. He joins us to talk about military service, Donald Trump, 2020, and how he's hoping the Democratic Party will change.

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Kirsten Gillibrand: Trump is pushing the ‘devil’s schemes’ Jun 19, 2018

Show notes

The New York senator has a different word for the family separation policy which the attorney general and White House press secretary call “Biblical.” Her word is “evil.” In the Biblical sense.

Referencing the “devil’s schemes” from the Book of Ephesians, the New York senator said President Donald Trump’s administration qualifies for that label “if you were talking in Christian language.” “To me? Yes, these are all things that come from the darkness that are ripping children from their mothers’ arms. That’s outrageous. I mean, that is not a positive, good thing. It is an evil, dark thing,” she says in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast.

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Jenny Durkan: ‘The baton got dropped,’ and Obama alums are running to finish what he started Jun 12, 2018

Show notes

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan was the first Obama appointee to win a major election after his presidency. She's part of a network of Obama administration officials that want his presidency to mark the start of a new progressive era — and in order to make it a reality, they’re focused on defeating Trump, not simply by opposing him, but by out-organizing him.

“‘Resist’ is too passive,” said Durkan. “We’ve got to focus and build a progress and a movement going forward,”

“We saw the immense amount of positive we could do in our communities,” Durkan said, adding that she saw also how much gets done when no one is looking, which she said is happening every day with the Trump administration.

“Not only are they rolling the clock backwards—they are—they’re in there dismantling, brick by brick. What he tweets in the morning drives the news cycle, and in the meantime, there’s an enormous amount of harm being done to the country,” she said.

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John Delaney: The 2020 long-shot candidate who’s gaining ground in Iowa Jun 05, 2018

Show notes

For Congressman John Delaney, the 2020 campaign is already underway. The money is there. So is the commitment. And people in are starting to pay attention.

The little-known Maryland congressman thinks that’s part of what will transform a presidential run that pretty much no one takes seriously into the next Jimmy Carter-style, out-of-nowhere explosion onto the presidential debate stage. Delaney, who made his fortune founding two commercial lending companies, has already spent $1 million out of his own pocket, using it for TV ads in Des Moines and a campaign office in Iowa. Since last summer, he’s taken 11 trips to the caucus state, plus eight to New Hampshire. He’s even written a new campaign book.

What does he have to show for it? While he’s been all but ignored in the national media, Delaney has an internal poll from Iowa that ranks him fifth in terms of name ID among potential Democratic candidates. Fifty-two percent of those likely 2020 Democratic caucus-goers polled know who John Delaney is, which puts him behind only Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker—and ahead of buzzed-about figures like Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris and Terry McAuliffe.

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