Every Thursday, the Spy hosts a conversation with Al From and Craig Fuller on the most topical political news of the moment.
This week, From and Fuller discuss the well-delivered State of the Union address by President Joe Biden and its failure to dramatically change voter preferences. Al and Craig also trade thoughts on the perceived rise of independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s poll numbers in swing states.
This video podcast is approximately sixteen minutes in length.
To listen to the audio podcast version, please use this link:
Background
While the Spy’s public affairs mission has always been hyper-local, it has never limited us from covering national or even international issues that impact the communities we serve. With that in mind, we were delighted that Al From and Craig Fuller, both highly respected Washington insiders, have agreed to a new Spy video project called “The Analysis of From and Fuller” over the next year.
The Spy and our region are very lucky to have such an accomplished duo volunteer for this experiment. While one is a devoted Democrat and the other a lifetime Republican, both had long careers that sought out the middle ground of the American political spectrum.
Al From, the genius behind the Democratic Leadership Council’s moderate agenda which would eventually lead to the election of Bill Clinton, has never compromised from this middle-of-the-road philosophy. This did not go unnoticed in a party that was moving quickly to the left in the 1980s. Including progressive Howard Dean saying that From’s DLC was the Republican wing of the Democratic Party.
From’s boss, Bill Clinton, had a different perspective. He said it would be hard to think of a single American citizen who, as a private citizen, has had a more positive impact on the progress of American life in the last 25 years than Al From.”
Al now lives in Annapolis and spends his semi-retirement as a board member of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University (his alma mater) and authoring New Democrats and the Return to Power. He also is an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School and recently agreed to serve on the Annapolis Spy’s Board of Visitors. He is the author of “New Democrats and the Return to Power.”
For Craig Fuller, his moderation in the Republican party was a rare phenomenon. With deep roots in California’s GOP culture of centralism, Fuller, starting with a long history with Ronald Reagan, leading to his appointment as Reagan’s cabinet secretary at the White House, and later as George Bush’s chief-of-staff and presidential campaign manager was known for his instincts to find the middle ground. Even more noted was his reputation of being a nice guy in Washington, a rare characteristic for a successful tenure in the White House.
Craig has called Easton his permanent home for the last five years, where now serves on the boards of the Academy Art Museum, the Benedictine School, and the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. He also serves on the Spy’s Board of Visitors.
Craig has called Easton his permanent home for the last eight years, where he now chairs the board of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum and is a former board member of the Academy Art Museum and Benedictine. He also serves on the Spy’s Board of Visitors and writes an e-newsletter available by clicking on DECADE SEVEN.
With their rich experience and long history of friendship, now joined by their love of the Chesapeake Bay, they have agreed through the magic of Zoom, to talk inside politics and policy with the Spy every Thursday.
Laurie Powers says
This was the most painful From-Fuller discussion I’ve ever listened to, primarily because I believe Mr. From is deeply in denial about presidential candidates Joe Biden and Robert Kennedy, Jr.
The good news is, they finally saw fit to bring the very viable Independent candidate RFK Jr. into the discussion now that his campaign is reaching the one-year mark and is steadily gaining momentum. This is by no means a strictly Biden-Trump rematch. The time has never been more ripe for a serious third party candidate (with 80% of the electorate wanting an alternative to the duopoly candidates), as opposed to it being a dangerous time, as Mr. From misguidedly laments. In a straight-up rematch, Biden loses on his own. If Democrats had been smart, and really wanted to defeat Trump, they would have gotten behind Kennedy when they had the opportunity. Instead, they shot themselves in the foot by preferring, with their extremely low standards, to take their chances with Establishment Joe (thank goodness he showed he can remain standing and not slur a prepared, angrily delivered SOTU speech), than support truly democratic, anti-establishment Kennedy, who has broad appeal within the entire electorate and threatens the long-standing power structure that the DNC and Democrat elite will fight like hell to maintain.
Biden is not the democracy president, contrary to what Mr. From insisted; he’s the anti-democracy, anti-Constitution and pro-war president. We have watched our freedoms and rights steadily stripped away the last three years, beginning with the loss of medical freedom/informed consent (and mandates that destroyed our workforce/further tanked the economy) and censorship of speech/information, which escalated during the pandemic and continues unabated at Biden’s behest. Thankfully, RFK Jr. is suing the Biden Administration for violating Americans’ 1st Amendment rights as he has successfully sued corrupt government agencies and corporations for decades to protect Americans. The visible and tangible damage done by the lockdowns and other failed pandemic policies under Trump and continued failings of the Biden administration has already set us back decades, as Mr. Fuller’s friend said about another Trump administration. We can’t afford a replay of either.
Mr. From’s stubbornness, distaste, or whatever it is, regarding Kennedy is obvious – he continues to parrot mainstream media smears and lies and appears to be completely misinformed, uninformed and closed-minded where Kennedy is concerned.
To correct some of Mr. From’s glaring falsehoods: Kennedy is not a conspiracy theorist, he’s ahead of his time with the truth that has been revealed reluctantly after the fact in every instance (no one has refuted any of the claims in his two recent bestselling books about Fauci, Pharma and the lab leak origin of Covid); he’s not anti-vax, he’s pro-vaccine safety and honest, thorough testing; he’s not against Ukraine, he’s an anti-war humanitarian; he cares deeply about democracy, Mr. From clearly hasn’t done his homework, Kennedy is by far the most democratic candidate of the three. He’s not a spoiler or protest vote candidate who has no chance of winning. And he is on more than one state ballot so far.
Multiple polls have shown that Kennedy has for many months and continues to lead all presidential candidates in favorability rating – the only candidate with a net positive rating (as correctly stated by Mr. Fuller) and numerous surveys have indicated that Kennedy is in the lead among Independents (nearly 50% of the electorate this cycle), voters under 35 and voters under 45 in swing states. The only group he’s not in the lead with are baby boomers because they primarily get their news from establishment legacy media outlets which refuse to cover Kennedy or if they do, it’s with the same tired smears and lies that Mr. From parroted. Fox and CNN’s Smerconish are the only exceptions, they invite Kennedy on and let him speak, without editing or spin as the others stoop to in their obvious support of Biden as if their jobs depend on it.
Kennedy has qualified to be on the ballot in at least 3 states and has gathered more than enough valid signatures to put him on the ballot in at least 5 more states with eight months to go. The campaign is confident that Kennedy will be on the ballot in all states by November. Mr. Kennedy has inspired a surging grass roots campaign as hasn’t been seen in decades, with hundreds of thousands of volunteers on the ground across the country and a dedicated network of independent journalists and podcasters who are providing visibility in the vacuum left by legacy media. Kennedy is the people’s candidate if there ever was one, and he is loved and admired by his many millions of supporters (as well as people around the world) for good reason – he listens to them, understands and cares about their real concerns and he will represent all Americans while defending peace, humanity and the planet when he’s in the White House.
This program does its listeners a disservice when it parrots mainstream propaganda with a closed mind, rather than digging even a little deeper, as it appears Mr. Fuller has done regarding RFK Jr. As a lifelong Democrat turned Independent as a result of the anti-democratic, increasingly authoritarian Biden administration, under which most ordinary Americans are worse off than they were during the Trump administration, I find myself resonating more with Mr. Fuller’s analysis and comments than Mr. From’s, which toe the line of the establishment Democrat elites who are equally out of touch with the majority of Americans. That is a distinction I used to think was reserved for the GOP.
Most intelligent and open-minded voters who don’t want to be forced to choose between the lesser of two evils again in our broken political system and take the time to listen directly to Robert Kennedy, Jr., look into his track record, what he stands for and what his presidential platform is, are won over and join the Kennedy populist movement. I urge those who are dissatisfied with the abysmal uniparty rematch to go to Kennedy24.com and learn what you’re missing out on and what a wonderful alternative we have in Robert Kennedy, Jr., the truth, freedom, unity, democracy, Constitution, critical-thinking, courageous, anti-corruption, anti-war candidate. Honestly, what’s not to like about that kind of a refreshing candidate? This is the time to step out of the corrupt two-party system and take our country back. In my opinion, there’s never been a better candidate for president than Bobby Kennedy, and we are lucky to have him.
Robert M Sommerlatte says
Your support of Kennedy would be understandable if it were Bobby, not Jr. Like Representative Gohmert’s siblings’ rejection, the Kenndey clan also rejects Jr. What do these families know about their fellow family member?
Here’s a quote from WBRU Boston piece. “In 1970, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was the ringleader of a pack of spoiled, rich kids who called themselves the Hyannis Port Terrors while vandalizing cars, stealing boats and experimenting with drugs. Eunice’s son, Bobby, was arrested at 16 for smoking weed with RFK Jr.
Bobby Shriver learned his lesson. Bobby Kennedy went on to sample much harder drugs with cousins who had far less formidable mothers than Eunice. “My Aunt Eunice yanked Bobby Shriver away from us before you could say ‘straight and narrow,’” Christopher Kennedy Lawford recalled in a memoir of his own drug use with and without his cousin RFK Jr.
Now that the unhinged conspiracy theorist is exploiting the family’s political legacy in his delusional bid for the White House, Eunice’s children are issuing their own warning about the namesake of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York.
“My cousin’s Super Bowl ad used our uncle’s faces — and my Mother’s,” Bobby Shriver wrote on X, the social media platform, after he saw the ad that substituted Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s face for the face of John F. Kennedy in an iconic TV ad from the 1960 presidential campaign. “She would be appalled by his deadly health care views. Respect for science, vaccines, & health care equity were in her DNA.”
Robert Parker says
If RFK, jr had any other last name, he would be a non-entity in U.S. politics and would not have even the limited support for the presidential nomination he currently garners. Claims that he is not a vaccine denier have been shown to be false from comments he has made on tape during interviews with various outlets. His “concerns” over vaccines is not limited to the Covid vaccines but to all childhood vaccines where he continues to parrot proven false claims of links to childhood autism. He has also claimed that both the 1918 “Spanish” influenza pandemic and HIV were caused by vaccine research. While RFK, jr holds many “main stream” Democrat positions on issues such as climate change, revising police funding priorities, student debt relief, his anti-war and U.S. isolationist positions reveal an uninformed, niave, view of the importance of U.S. involvement in the world as a whole and this world view alone would make his occupancy of the Oval Office a danger to the U.S. and liberal democracy throughout the world. However, at a time when there is a greater need to strengthen our Public Health infrastructure, his views on vaccines represent, in my opinion, a non-starter when considering a vote for President. The bottom line is that any vote for RFK, jr that would have otherwise gone for Biden brings trump closer the the White House. One can disagree with Biden’s policies, but he has been good for the country the past 3+ yrs and, in contrast to trump, supports our democracy. Ask yourself this: as long as we retain our democratic form of government any unsuccessful policies enacted by a 2nd Biden term could be corrected over a matter of a relatively few years. Can you say the same for the loss of our democracy during a 2nd trump administration?