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So I have to since anyone can be the speaker of the House — you don’t have to be a member — who all would you guys pick given your druthers?
I would be — I will be speaker.
No, that was going to — you were going to be my nominee.
Oh, well, there we —
Dammit, Ross.
Then we’re already — then I’ve won. Sorry, Lydia.
And do you know why? Because if there’s anybody out there who’s going to come clean about the alien cover-up —
Yeah, it’s true.
— you’re going to get to the bottom of it.
But my honest answer, because the job of speaker is clearly, clearly a thankless job, I am actually going to volunteer our dear fellow host Carlos Lozada, who sadly is [LAUGHS]:: down for the count today with a cold. So, Carlos, big news, you’re my pick to be speaker of the House. Congratulations.
Congratulations, Carlos. From New York Times Opinion, I’m Michelle Cottle.
I’m Ross Douthat.
I’m Lydia Polgreen.
And this is “Matter of Opinion.”
[MUSIC PLAYING]
All right, huge week, guys. Historic. The House is headless. And we are officially in uncharted territory. Kevin McCarthy is out as speaker of the House. His right-wingers, led by Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, drove him away. And the Republican conference is in chaos. No one knows where this is going. But I want to know, did McCarthy last longer than speakers and either of you expected?
Well, as you know, nine months is the perfect amount of time to produce a little being that arrives in the world with a screaming tantrum. So it seems quite —
— appropriate that it lasted nine months.
Ah, gestation.
And now I’m picturing Matt Gaetz as like the baby.
(LAUGHING) As a baby.
Oh, no.
Given how McCarthy started, the seeming impossibility of him getting the votes in the first place, it’s not surprising. I will say that a couple of months ago, I thought McCarthy was, by the standards of people with his impossible job, doing pretty well. And in that sense, I was surprised that it all unraveled this quickly.
Yeah. I mean, the Republican Party has been going through an identity crisis. And you’ve seen that playing out in Congress in their conference. There are a lot of big questions about where to go from here. And are they just completely ungovernable? So I guess let’s kick this off, maybe, with Ross. Do you want to take a stab at maybe, what do House Republicans actually want?
No. No. What?
What do house — well, so the actual number of House Republicans who voted to defenestrate their speaker was relatively — not relatively — it was extremely small, right? So what you have here is a scenario where you actually can’t draw dramatic generalizations about the radicalism of House Republicans overall based on this vote, because not that many Republicans voted to get rid of the speaker.
Republicans just have a very, very, very thin majority. And that gives disproportionate power to people who are ideologically extreme, procedurally extreme, willing to just blow things up, really happy to be in front of as many television cameras and microphones as possible, which I think is a fair characterization of the congressman from Florida, Mr. Gaetz.
The official reason for Gaetz turning on McCarthy was that McCarthy had not lived up to his promises, not specifically on policy but on how the House should be run. There’s a procedural debate. One way McCarthy had gotten some more highly ideological Republicans on his side had been to give them procedural concessions, to essentially give them more power in the ordinary running of the House.
And so that’s one issue. It’s supposed to be the people’s House. But in fact, power has become more and more centralized in the speaker’s office. And there’s discontent about that even before you get to ideological issues.
Yeah. I mean, this is an interesting split that has become a problem for the Republican conference. Specifically, again, you had the proceduralists who wanted things to run differently. And then you had the people who were pushing policy demands. So you have people in the Freedom Caucus who were threatening to shut down the government over things like border security or spending with the folks who were calling for having the House behave and operate in a different way.
Yeah, hold up for a second guys because, I mean, I have a confession, which is that I am a person who has never covered national politics in the United States. I spent most of my life living outside of the United States. And obviously, I’m interested in and follow along with a lot of this stuff.
Welcome to American democracy, Lydia Polgreen.
Yeah, thanks, guys. I confess that I haven’t been super tuned in. But I feel like I’m really not alone in that. Just looking at my group texts, they’re full of people who are journalism and journalism adjacent, being like, can anybody explain to me what happened this week? And I confess I feel a little bit of that myself.
And yes, we call the House the people’s House. But what we’re seeing here is a very small chunk of people able to essentially kind of set off a chaos bomb in the middle of the House. My brain breaks a little bit in trying to understand how this leads to anyone getting anything that they want. So can somebody explain that to me?
Well, one of the most frustrating things about Kevin McCarthy was that he rigged the House procedures and rules to make them more dysfunctional. You had the ability for one member to blackmail the speaker, essentially, and threaten to throw him out. You had him put multiple hard-liners on the House Rules Committee, which basically decides which bills come to the floor and under what circumstances.
You have all these ways that kind of lead the House away from actually forming a big majority compromise on anything and empower your right wing. So when it comes time to try and get anything done, it becomes almost impossible because you are held hostage by the most extreme members.
Right, but I mean, just to — and I’m not pushing back on you here. But it seems to me that a Congress, even before this, that could really only get things done using these huge reconciliation bills was already deep in trouble in terms of how it operated. The notion that the only way to pass things is to have an up or down vote that includes everything that we’re going to spend money on, to me, is a symptom of deeper problems. I don’t know, Ross. I’m curious.
Yes. No, I mean, clearly, clearly, it’s a symptom of deeper problems. And the McCarthy theory in doing the things that Michelle just mentioned was if you give the MAGA folks the hard right buy-in by putting them on the Rules Committee, by saying, don’t worry, if you hate me you, can do a motion to vacate. If you do these things, you will win goodwill that will lead to smoother functioning in the House.
And in our last debt ceiling debate, that actually seemed to work pretty well. And everybody talked about how Kevin McCarthy was doing a pretty good job.
Let’s be clear. I did not talk about —
You did not.
— how he was doing a good job.
OK. OK, others less — others less —
The less exacting audience than Michelle Cottle.
No, no. I’m just saying, in this one instance —
The suckers, the marks were taken in. But this was the theory because the problem is you can come up with specific changes in the way the House functions that would avoid certain problems like this. For instance, the rule could be that the speaker of the House is just chosen by a majority of the majority party, that it doesn’t have to be a majority of the whole House. That would remove this particular kind of coup scenario. You could get rid of the debt ceiling votes altogether. The Democrats could have done that when they fully controlled government.
Also in favor of that.
Yeah.
But they didn’t, in part because I think they saw it as an opportunity to put Republicans in a political corner. So case by case, instance by instance, you can say, you could make this change and that change, and things would work a bit better. But there are just sort of these underlying issues with how the House runs that are, I think, reflective of general sclerosis and general problems of American decadence.
They’re also reflective of problems, basic problems, in the Republican Party, which is that the Republican Party is a party that is officially committed to and told by all its leaders that it is the party that limits government and doesn’t raise spending. But the country doesn’t like steep spending cuts. Big chunks of the Republican base are invested in entitlement programs and Medicare and Social Security and don’t want those changed.
So you have this deep tension between the promises that the party’s leaders make about limiting the size and scope of government and the capacities to actually do anything once you have power. And this all predates Trump. This was the story of the Tea Party era. This was the story —
Well, sure. But Trump made it even more complicated because he came along. And he said, we’re not going to make big spending cuts and entitlements. We’re not going to have an austerity government. And so the most popular leader of the Republican Party for the last several years has been a guy who has completely blown up the idea that you need to worry about deficits, but only when he’s in office.
I guess, if I could ask a procedural question, like, what happens next?
Ross, do you want to throw in there?
Michelle? Michelle? No. No, I’ve been talking, Michelle.
The very narrow answer is the jockeying has already begun for who’s going to be the next driver of this clown car. It’ll start voting next week. But it’s anybody’s guess as to where it will go.
Yeah, I mean, it could be — I think we need to entertain the possibility that Patrick McHenry, the bow-tied congressman from North Carolina, who my conservative friends in Washington consider, I should say, one of the most serious people in the House of Representatives and one of the most — therefore, one of the most long suffering.
We should be open to the possibility that he could still be the acting speaker in a month. I mean, I don’t think he will be. But there are scenarios where the voting takes a long time. Other things have to be accomplished that can be accomplished while he’s acting speaker. Maybe negotiation with Democrats gets easier when there isn’t a speaker to blame for the deals that have to be cut. So yeah, I offer no predictions about who will be speaker. And I think —
Oh, no, no. I stay away from that.
Nothing would surprise me in terms of how long it could actually take. The other issue here is that I think one of the things that surprised me about McCarthy’s rapid fall was that there was no real attempt by him to get any Democrats to help him. If a bunch of Democrats had simply voted present, I believe, right?
Yeah.
Then he would still be speaker. So you don’t need — you don’t even need Democrats to vote for you. And it’s interesting because McCarthy had seemed to me like a guy who had made every imaginable compromise — political, moral, otherwise — in order to be speaker of the House. He really wanted to be speaker of the House. But he didn’t want to offer anything to Democrats. And he didn’t even — it wasn’t even that he didn’t offer something specifically to Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic Minority Leader. He didn’t even take time to try and whip 9 or 10 random Democrats or something into voting present.
Well, but I mean, I have to say, McCarthy basically was like, Democrats you should support me out of respect for the institution. And it seems to me that there’s a certain kind of Republican that believes that it’s the job of the Democrats to be the grown-ups and that the Republican caucus and total just absolute clowns like Matt Gaetz get to behave like absolute clowns. But we have grown-ups in the room, and they are the Democrats. I know it’s Dems in disarray, Republicans in array is the —
That’s old.
That’s old, old news.
That’s the past. Long gone.
I know that’s been turned over a long time ago.
That’s the old model.
It is striking to me that Kevin McCarthy would even sort of like contemplate the idea that Democrats would support him just because. You know, you’re the guys who like democracy.
Sure. And I do think part of the problem wasn’t even kind of what Kevin has done or what he might do or how annoying he can be or whatever. It’s that both parties had decided that his word was worth about the same as a degree from Trump University at this point. You just couldn’t trust him most of the time. You never knew what he was going to do. He would screw you on this or back out on this or change his mind on this. And it speaks to the flexibility that helped him do what he needed to do to get speaker. But it then leaves you in a position where if nobody trusts you as speaker, that’s a real problem.
How very Trumpian he is. The other person who strikes me as very Trumpian and all that and is perhaps the Trumpiest character in all of this is Matt Gaetz, right? I mean, if we think that Donald Trump is running for president in part to avoid legal trouble, (LAUGHING) Matt Gaetz is clearly — I mean, he’s in some hot water too. And that’s part of his personal beef with McCarthy, right?
Oh, yeah, he’s mad that McCarthy did not intervene in a House Ethics investigation into some of the more unsavory accusations about Matt’s supposed predilections for younger women and things like that.
Teenagers?
I mean, part of the problem here is he’s so loathsome as a kind of foil. I mean, you almost wanted to back McCarthy just because Matt is so loathsome.
I think the best way to understand what happened is that Gaetz set up McCarthy to make a deal with the Democrats so that he would have this excuse to go for it. I think the interesting question is what Gaetz himself wants. Does he want to be United States senator from Florida?
Oh, god, help us.
Maybe? Because he’s clearly not headed up the ranks of leadership in the House. And he’s not building a Tea Party-style movement exactly around himself. He does talk a lot about spending and the deficit and the debt.
And the fortunate thing about all of this is that the United States of America currently has a significant deficit problem. By this, I mean we’ve always had high deficits and so on. But in the Tea Party era, Republicans were warning about a debt crisis, warning about rising inflation and rising interest rates. And those things just never materialized in that period.
I think now that interest on government debt is at 4.5 percent and rising, our deficit numbers are explosive with no sort of plan to bring them back down, there is actually now a better case for trying to do something about the deficit. But the evolution of the Republican Party since the Tea Party has made the party even more incapable of doing the thing that, again, they’re sort of ideologically committed to. And Trump is part of that. But so is the changing composition of the party that he helped usher in.
Actually, that’s a great spot for us to take a break. When we come back, we’ll talk about those voters Trump brought into the party and how the identity of being a Republican has changed in his wake. Stick with us. We’ll be right back.
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So moving from the Civil War and identity crisis in the Republican Congress, it is reflective of what’s going on in the party, right, guys? I mean, what does it mean to be a Republican today? I mean, Ross, you were starting to get in some thoughts on this.
Yeah. I was just going to say that there’s been some kind of shift in the constituencies within the Republican Party that is a long-term shift but accelerated by Trump, where the Republican Party is — it’s a more working-class party. It’s a party of lower trust. But it’s still a ideologically pretty sort of small government-oriented party, at least on paper.
There’s an interesting study recently that showed as the Republican Party has become more working class and more educated voters have moved into the Democratic party, instead of that making Republican voters more left wing on economics because they’re more downscale and making Democratic voters more libertarian on economics because they’re more upscale, the voters have sort of adapted to their new coalitions.
So the upscale Democrats, in spite of being upscale, still officially favor a strong social safety net and higher taxes. And the downscale Republicans, despite being downscale, have become more skeptical of government.
Well, they’ve become more skeptical of government. But they’re still, I think — and this is a thing that now there seems to be kind of bipartisan consensus on — the floor, meaning the kind of great society programs that define our lives — Social Security, Medicare — those are just off the table. And that is — I mean, I’m old enough to remember when former Speaker of the House in Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan wanted to privatize Social Security. George W. Bush, that was part of his politics.
And I mean, to me, that seems like a big change that — I mean, I agree with you that I don’t think that the Trump coalition necessarily wants to see huge, massive new government spending programs for the poor. But there has been, I think, a decisive shift on some of these things that really did feel like they were in the sights of, in particular, the last couple of speakers of the House. So that seems like a big change.
Yes. No, no, I think that’s right. I mean, although the failures of both George W. Bush and Paul Ryan reflected the fact, in part, that even then Social Security and Medicare were held in high regard, let’s say, by a lot of Republican voters who were otherwise skeptics of government. But that pattern has strengthened. So now you have a low-trust, downscale, antigovernment, pro-Medicare and Social Security Republican Party.
And also, I would add the Affordable Care Act, right? I mean, they’ve tried so many times to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. And there just isn’t a constituency for it, even as states have not wanted to expand it. So I think it’s not just those super old programs. Once people experience the goodies, they seem loathe to give them up.
Yeah, one of the shifts that you do seem to have had as far as views on government, the focus seems to be that a lot of the Republican base is happy if government is going to help protect them from the encroachment of cultural change. So if you want to make sure that your kids aren’t getting woke indoctrination or you’re not so keen on affirmative action or whatever, you want government to step in. You don’t want the immigrants coming over the border and invading your particular enclave. These things —
Are you describing New York City liberal politics or conservative politics there, Michelle? See, that, I don’t think, is a change. Republicans have always thought that public schools, which are run by the government, should have strong parental input in what is taught. Republicans have become more hard-line on immigration. It’s true. But I think that has been a response to actual trends in immigration as much as a big ideological shift. I think if immigration rates were lower and the border were more secure, that would be a less salient issue for Republicans.
Republicans have always been against affirmative action. And if anything on education, the thing you’ve seen at the state level from Republican governments has been a big new push for school choice and school vouchers. I don’t think there’s been a big turn toward a new faith in government or something on those issues. They’re more anti-big business.
Oh, no, I — let me clarify.
That’s what you see. And more anti-Silicon Valley.
They have traditionally had a split, whereas they’ve never wanted abortions. They always wanted the government to protect them from that. But there was a big split because they were very small government in other ways. But now they seem to be big government in most ways.
Well, no, but what do you mean? On the cultural issues, like, it’s not —
Economically populist.
Well, no, I don’t think this is true. I think there is a faction in the party that wants economic populism.
I think the base — the grassroots base is more economically populist. Thanks to Donald Trump, in part, got a lot of ground.
See, as someone who is sympathetic to economic populism, I really wish that was the case. To some degree, I wish the Republican base was really interested in family policy and industrial policy and these kinds of things. But I think it’s much more the base like Social Security. It likes Medicare. It doesn’t like other forms of government spending.
You can elect some Republicans who are more populist — JD Vance, Josh Hawley, and so on. You can get people in there. But they are a small faction within the party. I don’t think there’s been a full realignment where Republicans are now just pro-government. I think they’re pro-government on a few particular things but retain this deep-set sense that the government spends too much money. We need to cut spending. New spending is a bad idea. That’s still really potent in the party, which is part of why the party is ungovernable because you can’t actually restrain spending if you aren’t touching Medicare and Social Security.
Well, but it’s interesting to think a little bit about the 2022 midterms, where obviously, the Democrats did better than people expected them to do. It wasn’t a total wipeout as they expected. But there were some interesting places where there was some real softness for Democrats. And you know, New York State has its own issues and problems.
But I do think that one shouldn’t take for granted, particularly not so much on the presidential election, because there, I think the issues are a little bit more stark. But I do wonder if the kind of hangover reputation of the Republican Party being the people that you are going to keep the government from just going hog-wild with, quote, unquote, “your money,” I think that that probably had something to do with the Republicans being successful in certain districts, where they didn’t have absolutely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs candidates running.
Oh, yeah. Well, in the polls — I think a poll just before the House descended into chaos showed Republicans with a bigger advantage than they’ve had in years over the Democrats on who’s most trusted on the economy. But that dynamic that you’re describing, Lydia, it’s the vote for Republicans to curb Democrats’ mentality, right?
Yeah.
Which is a huge part of why the Republican Party is a going concern —
100 percent.
— in American life. It is held — the thing that binds the base. And the swing voters who vote for Republicans two out of every three elections, what binds them together is a desire not to be simply governed by Democratic trifectas. And sometimes that’s a fear of wokeness and cultural progressivism. Sometimes it’s a sense of, like, why can’t Joe Biden secure the border? Sometimes it’s about, wow, we spent a lot of money. And now we have inflation. Maybe we should spend less money.
All of that, though, doesn’t tell Republicans what to do (LAUGHING) when they actually have power. It’s a great force for keeping the party going.
No, they get power. And they’re like, OK, let’s do something insane that everybody hates.
Well, 20 percent of them want that, right?
No. But now because of the rules and the way that they are, you don’t even need 20 percent. You’ve got like —
This is part of the problem that Trump has exacerbated, which is the party can’t really do any kind of serious realignment or redefinition if it is a cult of personality. So you wind up with things like the party doesn’t have a platform. Its platform is whatever Donald Trump wants.
I alone will fix it.
But the secret of Trump’s success was that — what does Donald Trump want? Whatever liberals don’t want.
Whatever, exactly.
What liberals don’t want.
He doesn’t want to do crazy ideological things. Yeah, he let Paul Ryan try and replace Obamacare. And he put conservative justices on the Supreme Court because he had to. But in his heart, Trump just wants to fight wars against the media, the failing “New York Times,” the liberals, the haters and losers, right? And oddly, that’s actually, you know, sort of fits with what a lot of people want from the Republican Party, including moderates.
I totally think that the Republican Party is defined by grievance. And I do not mean that as white grievance or even economic grievance. It’s just increasingly, the people who are unhappy about the direction of either their life or the country want somebody who’s going to stand up and fight the people that they blame for this.
But it isn’t — I agree it’s grievance. But it isn’t just — grievance makes it sound like you’re aggrieved about something that’s happened. But part of it too is you just don’t want certain things to happen. And voting for Republicans is the only way to prevent them from happening.
Yeah, but it’s a trajectory thing.
It’s not grievance to say, I don’t want Democrats in charge of my state anymore. That’s not grievance. That’s just sort of a normal sense of, I don’t trust the Democratic Party with power. That’s what pulls in more than just people who are marinating in —
Sure. But then why don’t they trust the Democratic Party? Because they don’t like the trajectory of the country.
Yes. The trajectory, right. But I guess the way this gets framed by liberals is the trajectory of the country is like this organic thing, and it naturally moves in this more progressive direction. And as it does, some people, the poor dears, can’t handle it, and they get aggrieved. But in fact, what’s happened in the country in the last couple of years is that Democrats have been in charge. And crime is up, and the border is not secure. And inflation got really high, and wages suck. And we’re stuck supporting a endless trench war with Russia. So it’s not grievance. It’s not grievance. You’ve —
Crime is up in red states far more than it is in blue states. I mean, just like — let’s be real, right? We don’t have federal law enforcement. I mean, this is not a —
Yeah, Ron DeSantis doesn’t talk about Miami when he —
I’m just channeling. You wanted me to channel some grievance.
I do. I love it when you get all worked up.
I’ve channeled it, OK?
We love when you channel grievance. But I just — again, the trajectory of country, these are all things that feel so sort of like, on what measure, and how? I mean, these questions of how you feel about how things are going are so nebulous and hard to contain it. And the reality is nobody has a plan to deal — I mean, even if people have plans to deal with these problems, there’s, like, no mechanism under our current system to actually make change happen.
Well, no, no. If you don’t like how much money the —
Well, if we elected Ross.
If you don’t like how much money the Democrat — well, in some cases, that’s right. In some cases, that’s right. But if you don’t like how much money the Democrats spent in the first two years of Joe Biden’s administration and you —
Far less than Trump spent, but yes.
— don’t like the inflation rates, you can — under very different interest rates condition, I’m just saying, in this discrete moment, if you didn’t like how much money was spent could vote for a House Republican candidate and ensure, thanks to the magic of divided government, that less money would be spent. You could make that happen.
I’m a fan of divided government.
No, except —
And less money relative to what Bernie Sanders would want to spend is going to be spent.
Fine. But if you’re like a normie centrist person and you’re like, OK, I’m going to vote for a normie centrist Republican to represent me in the House of Representatives, and then come to find out that the House of Representatives is held hostage by this tiny group of lunatics. So I don’t see how that swing voter is going to feel particularly served having a Republican-controlled House if the price of having a Republican-controlled House is that you’re going to have a handful of people who are able to hold the entire thing hostage for their nutso agenda. Then I don’t see how that centrist voter is served.
Well, I mean, this gets to a separate question, which is that, how much do voters care about how smoothly the House of Representatives runs?
Well, they don’t like it when government shuts down.
No, I mean, look, the numbers for House Republicans right now, I’m sure, are not very good. But we have lived through cycles of crazy Republican misbehavior in the House. And I have dutifully written columns saying, republicans are dooming themselves in the next election with swing voters by doing this. And then the next election rolls around. And Republicans, you know, sometimes they do better. Sometimes they do worse.
But there’s a lot of voters who think about politics as little as possible —
Can you blame them?
— who voted for Republicans because inflation — well, they’re not listening to this podcast. So their lives are — they vote for Republican. They voted for Republicans because inflation was high. Now inflation is diminishing. And the government is not passing big new spending bills. And why would they be desperately unhappy with the fact that Kevin McCarthy is no longer speaker of the House?
No, no, no. I don’t think they’re — I don’t think that they’re desperately unhappy about that. But I think if you think about this bananas situation where we’re in, where we actually could see a government shutdown. And we all know that when the government shuts down, that has never been good for Republicans.
Yeah, people don’t like that.
Another debt crisis. This opens up a Pandora’s box of things that could — that people absolutely will notice. People will notice that. Yes, nobody cares about Kevin McCarthy’s sad plan to get the Bakersfield Airport named after him by being a famous speaker of the House. But they do care when (LAUGHING) viable things that they depend on are no longer available to them, because these nutsos shut down the government.
As wrapping this up, though, I’m going to just say to Ross’s point, the problem is short attention spans. They’ll care now. Will they care next year?
Well, if the government shuts down for two years, they’ll care.
Oh, but the government’s not going to shut down for two years.
The government shut down for 10 days.
Trump’s not going to jail. The government’s not going to shut down for a really long time. And they’re not going to give you the alien corpses, Ross. OK? So on that extraterrestrial note, we’re going to leave it there. And when we come back, we’re going to get hot and cold.
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And we’re back. It’s time for hot cold. Who’s got it for us this week?
I think that’s me. And I really have gotten into pencils. And that might seem like —
Pencils?
— an odd thing to be hot on.
Colored pencils?
No, no. Like a lot of people, or at least anecdotally a lot of people in my life, I have been trying to lean into the analog, reading more paper books and magazines and things like that, trying to spend less time on my phone. And actually, last summer, I had a bit of time off. And I thought, I’m going to take on a small self-improvement project.
And I said, you know what, I really want to improve my handwriting because like a lot of people of our generation, I learned cursive in school and had very nice penmanship but then have typed only for my entire professional career. So my handwriting, I can barely read it myself, God forbid anyone else.
Serial killer handwriting.
Yeah, exactly. But anyway, I did not, it turns out, use my time off to improve my handwriting. Big shocker. But what I discovered is that if I write using a pencil that my handwriting is much, much better. And so —
Interesting.
— I’ve recently gotten very into different kinds of pencils. And my favorite is this thing that’s called a Blackwing that was used by artists. But even a good old classic yellow, like Dixon Ticonderoga HB pencil, totally fantastic.
I support you. When I’m editing on paper, which doesn’t happen very often, what I like best in life is a super sharpened pencil.
So you can stab the page?
Because once it gets dull, I’m not into it at all. It has to be sharpened again. And my one kind of obsession is I like the pencils that have the erasers that don’t destroy your page. I know that sounds stupid. But there is a kind of pencil that the erasers are too slick. And they just ruin it. So I am a pencil purist on this — no mechanical, very sharp, has to have a good eraser.
Ross, I’m guessing, is a quill and inkwell kind of man.
I mean, obviously, with my — I seal my letters with hot wax with the sigil of house Douthat. No, I’m just envious of this — the time, the freedom to —
To sharpen a pencil?
I haven’t thought —
What is wrong with you?
The idea that I would — someone would sit down and think to themselves. I know you didn’t actually do it. But I will improve my penmanship. It just casts the — frankly, this sort of — the chaos of my own life into sharp relief.
Lydia’s here to show us a better way, Ross.
It’s a way. I don’t know.
I don’t think I’ve written with a pencil in a long time.
I guess know what I’m getting you for Christmas, Ross.
I can’t wait.
Pencils for Ross.
Thanks, guys. I think, basically, now that we have our Christmas shopping for Ross wrapped up, we can go from here.
All right, till next week.
See you then. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Thanks for joining our conversation. If you liked it, be sure to follow “Matter of Opinion” on your favorite podcast app. And give us a review while you’re there. And tell us what you think we should be talking about by emailing us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com.
“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett and Derek Arthur. Edited by Alison Bruzek. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud, Sonia Herrero and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.
