Dan Pfeiffer

And if you're just talking out of your ass every time someone calls you on the phone, you're going to have like a domestic political and international public diplomacy disaster.

That's kind of what we see here.

I just remember how much time we spent thinking about the things that we said, not just Barack Obama, but the White House press secretary, anyone on TV, anyone who spoke on behalf of the president, anyone in the government, how those words would be interpreted by not just the American people, and that matters a lot, obviously, but...

The markets, like there were times during the financial crisis where things that people said could set the market reeling, how it would be viewed by other governments around the world, both friend and foe.

And then Tommy and I were talking about this the other day, but just like as we were engaged in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of the things we were thinking about a lot was how the rest of the Muslim world was seeing what the United States was doing.

in terms of what that would mean for people being radicalized against the US, how we were combating the recruiting efforts from Al-Qaeda and ISIS and the rest and thinking about those things.

And they're thinking about none of those things as far as I can tell.

Like,

It's just sort of wild to take it so unseriously.

And every single day.

Yes.

Let's pivot to domestic politics for a second.

Another reason why you're an excellent guest for the show is even before you went to work for Barack Obama, you were at the DCCC when the Democrats took the House in 2006.

You've worked on a lot of campaigns in your life.

Sort of in the initial –

This is even before – like Democrats were probably favored to take the House before the war.

Depending on how this goes or how long it stands, that's obviously going to probably not be great for Trump and the Republicans.

But right now, as we look at the – the main conversation about the midterms has been

about the primaries, Democratic primaries, right?

With the amount of attention that was spent on both in Texas and nationally, I'm sure on your network and our network as well, on the Texas primary between James Tallarico and Jasmine Crockett,