Bill Press
Steve Jaxon welcomed frequent guest Bill Press, political commentator, member of the White House press corps, author, syndicated radio host, and a friend of the show, on to The Drive last Monday, to talk about his book Buyer’s Remorse: How Obama Let Progressives Down, and about the current state of the presidential race.
When Steve asked how everything is going in Washington, Bill replied, “It’s crazy,” and went straight to current campaign news. “I was just watching Donald Trump speak to AIPAC, the first time ever he actually read a speech from a Teleprompter. I think people told him, you better not wing it in front of this crowd or you could get into some serious trouble!”
Steve then asked, “I saw one thing he said, about the US should rethink our position with NATO? What the hell’s he talking about?” Bill told that, “Yes, he said that earlier in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN. He said it was time to pull back our troops from NATO and I guess let Vladimir Putin run over as many countries as he wants.”
The conversation turned to Bill Press’s new book. Steve said, “I heard someone on TV saying something giving you a little grief about having Bernie Sanders on the cover of your book, saying, ‘Bill Press makes the case… read this book,’ and it’s called Buyer’s Remorse, How Obama Let Progressives Down.”
Here is the complete audio of the segment with Bill Press:
Bill’s reply was swift, “Well, that was Hillary Clinton who gave Bernie grief about what she said was writing the forward to the book, which he did not do, he simply wrote a blurb to the book, a blurb, by the way, that says nothing about President Obama at all…
The cover of Buyer’s Remorse.
“It just says that the next president, whoever he or she is by the way, has to use the bully pulpit, go out and rally progressives to put pressure on Congress to put pressure on Congress in order to get change done. Maybe President Obama should have done a lot more of that. (…) [The book] talks about the good things that President Obama has done, but it also points out there are ways where he’s let us down, as Progressives… I just think I put out the good and the bad, it’s what we ought to do with any president, including one of our own.”
Asked for some more insight into the book, Bill offered, “People ask me, why did you write a book that is in any way critical of the Obama administration, with less than a year to go. And my answer is, because President Obama asked me to. What I mean by that is when he was running for office, and in the White House, I heard him say several times, ‘I want you to hold me accountable,’ and that’s what I did. And when you look at his record, you’ve got to agree that the really good things. Where he is today, this opening to Cuba is incredible! It will be one of the great hallmarks of this administration. I believe the Iran nuclear deal is a great foreign policy achievement. You know, he saved the auto industry. He did bring us back from economic ruin.
“At the same time, he’s done some things which as Progressives, if George Bush had done, we’d be raising holy hell about them.” He went on to mention the NSA, Wall Street getting off the hook and weak parts of Obamacare, explaining, “I try to put it in perspective. And the main part about the book is, calling on Hillary or Bernie, …that they’ve got to recognize that the American people really do want to focus on the working class Americans, middle class Americans, the Progressive agenda, minimum wage, creation of jobs, climate change, the whole progressive agenda. And they want to run with it full bore and not be too willing to compromise with Republicans, which I think Obama was, too often.”
Steve mentioned that they were talking to Eric Boehlert of Media Matters, last hour, who wrote that Meet the Press isn’t going to let Trump phone it in anymore and Bill had this to say about Trump:
“Let me tell you, it is outrageous the way the media as sucked up to Donald Trump. They have let him get away with everything… They figured it out, 6 billion dollars worth of free media. The media created Donald Trump. And allowing him to phone it in to the Sunday shows, …they’ve never allowed before. As if he were a statesman, but he’s not, he’s a clown.”
Bill offered this additional observation. “I’ll tell you one thing I find really funny now. The Republicans realize, ‘Oh Jesus, we might end up with Donald Trump as the nominee, we can’t let that happen.’ So suddenly they’re scurrying around and they send Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan out to attack him. And they’re creating super PACs, they’re raising money and they’re running ads. You know what? It’s too little too late. They created Donald Trump, they’re stuck with him how, as far as I’m concerned.”
“As a Democrat, and a former Democratic Party Chairman of California, I’ve never enjoyed politics so much, in this sense. For too many years I’ve watched Democrats eating their own and forming the circular firing squad. It’s fun to watch Republicans doing it, for once.”
Steve asked who is this group. “There are about 30 of them, who met last week, the so-called Republican establishment, which is also a joke, because Trump’s success is running against the Republican establishment. The more the Republican establishment tries to take him down, the better it is for Trump! But they’re clowns. These are the guys who supported Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio and all those people, ask all of them how well they did against Donald Trump… They had a chance to stop him, early on and they did not do so. It’s too late now.”
This brought him to an important point for his own party. “By the way, what I think is a very sober lesson for us Democrats, which is, don’t take this guy for granted, don’t underestimate him, don’t ignore him, don’t be nice to him. I think what Democrats have to do is define him early and destroy him politically before he gets a foothold.”
In closing, Steve asked, “What do you think is going to happen to the Republican party?” Bill Press replied, “I don’t think it will be the end of the Republican Party, but it will be the end of the Republican Party as we know it, which was imploding pretty fast anyway and throwing anybody with any common sense or any sense of decency out the window anyhow, which is what led the way to a demagogue like Donald Trump… It’s unbelievable. This billionaire flies in on his plane with Trump all over it, and stands in front of his plane and says, ‘I’m the candidate who’s going to take care of the working class and the middle class’ and people believe him!”
“As a Democrat, and a former Democratic Party Chairman of California, I’ve never enjoyed politics so much, in this sense. For too many years I’ve watched Democrats eating their own and forming the circular firing squad. It’s fun to watch Republicans doing it, for once.”
For more information about Bill Press, visit https://billpress.com/