CLAY: David Axelrod — who was instrumental in Barack Obama being elected president and serving for eight years, so he certainly knows Joe Biden well — acknowledged on CNN that there’s not a lot that Biden can do with that midterm freight train looming as we move closer and closer to November 8th. Listen to this.

AXELROD: The question is: What can leadership do? I mean, there are limited levers to pull here relative to some of the things that are troubling people. Obviously on the baby formula issue, he’s exercised the Defense Production Act and there are things that you can do at the margins but in many ways he’s at the mercy of larger forces here.

Inflation is hard to reverse. The Fed has the major cudgel here. But that involves raising interest rates which has its own problems. There are other things you could do like, uh, relative to tariffs or student loans that would be unpopular. And there really aren’t a lot of tools here for him and that’s what makes this so uncomfortable.

BUCK: Can we just say, this is David Axelrod, who is smart — not particularly ethical or anything, but he’s a smart guy, for what that’s worth — basically telling Democrats, “I got nothing.” He’s like, “Look, there’s really not anything realistically between now and Election Day where there’s a real game-changing opportunity for the Democrats given what the polls are showing, what the economy is doing.” They simply don’t have…

Think of it this way: If they could convince people right now that the country is doing well, we could get invaded by China, the government could get overthrown, and they would be still be telling us, right? At some level, it just turns into absurdity. There’s no connection to reality if they can actually get away with say things are going well right now. So, I think that what you’re going to see from Democrats is an effort to hyper-localize as much as they possibly can, right?

Every congressional seat, every Senate seat is about that district, that state, that one candidate, and a lot of separating the Democrat candidates out there, especially in any competitive state, right? What they’re gonna do for seats in New York and California is all their just Democrats are gonna win the places they always win. But for any place where there’s a competitive seat up, they’re going to be saying, “Oh, I’m not here doing Joe Biden’s bidding.”

And that, I think the media’s also realized, Clay, that Jan. 6 is just not gonna do it. People just feel like… It’s actually gone from, “It’s an unfair narrative, it doesn’t represent the entire Republican Party,” et cetera. But even more than that, it’s not politically potent because people see CNN running that stuff; they’re like, “I don’t have baby formula right now. You want to lecture me on January 6 and the threat to our democracy?”

You know, the dirty trickster in chief Hillary Clinton gonna go out there and Democrats are gonna make a big stink about how the threat to our democracy? No. The threat to people right now is they can’t pay their bills because the idiots in charge seem to think they can spend whatever money they want and there’s no consequences. Turns out they’re wrong.

CLAY: And a lot of people are gonna dial out. As you well know, we’ve got Memorial Day weekend coming up, and people start going on vacation. They do what I do, which is spend a ton of time at Little League parks, if you got kids. Your kids are gonna be out. You gotta keep ’em busy. Wednesday, my kids get out of school for the summer. I’m gonna go pick ’em up and then start being responsible to try to keep them busy, right?

And that will go all the way up to many people for Labor Day. And you know what’s gonna be the constantly resonant tone here? How angry everybody is every time they fill up their gas tank. That is a tried-and-true test every single day of what is the president and his political party meaning for you, and you put that hose in and it’s over a hundred dollars for you to fill up your car, your SUV, your truck, whatever it is, the highest it’s ever been? Every single time that happens, Buck, it’s another point off, it feels like, for Joe Biden’s approval.

BUCK: And I would just also note, as they’re gonna be trying to come up with different narratives and stores lines about this, if the Democrats… I think people — and this is in some ways what’s really, I think, pushing a lot of the momentum. It’s not just that things are bad. It’s that if the Democrat Party had its way — if it weren’t for Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema — and then all of a sudden Republicans saying, “Stop being crazy, libs! Don’t do this!” If they actually got… If Build Back Better had passed, if Democrats had enough votes for cap and trade, for the Green New Deal, for all their environmentalist fantasies, lunacies, the price of gas would be question higher, inflation would be much higher.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Not only are things going poorly, the only reason they aren’t going worse in every respect that matters across the country — the border, the economy, you name it — is that there has been some pushback on the Democrat ought to do so that would have actually made everything worse, would have added to the current woes that we see, and I think people are realizing that (chuckling) and that’s particularly terrifying.

BUCK: Well, and that’s what I think is a really great sales pitch for Republicans. Look. We have all the failures of the Biden administration. But really at this point what you’re hoping to do is run out the clock. Just keep Joe Biden from being able to do anything worse during the rest of his term in office. So they’re gonna go off all the congressional House of Representatives members and all of the senators who are up for reelection.

They’re gonna leave D.C. in the summer, and then the hope is that they don’t try to do something with a lame-duck Congress to pass through legislation, and then you don’t really allow anything in ’23 and ’24 to happen. And then we go into a new presidential election. Now, who’s even gonna be running for the Democrats and what that’s gonna look like on their side — and then what’s gonna happen?

I saw a straw poll come out, Buck, from Wisconsin looking at 2024 contenders, and Trump came in second to Ron DeSantis. Now, that’s a little bit of an outlier poll. Obviously there’s lots of people out there that are very excited about Donald Trump running again in 2024, but there are also other Republicans that are angling to say, “Hey, I’m not going to sit this one out and just let Trump be the default nominee.”

Now, is that gonna be a minority opinion? Maybe. But I’ve said for a while, I think DeSantis is gonna run. We know guys like Chris Christie and Mike Pence and people of that ilk are going to toss their hat into the ring. So both political parties are gonna have real big decisions to make basically the morning after we wake up on November 9th and see what the actual outcome is as it pertains to the midterms.

BUCK: You know, there’s that wisdom, so to speak, or the conventional wisdom for presidents that everything you’re gonna get done you have to get done essentially in the first six months because then it just turns into political battles?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Well, it’s funny: Except for the Biden administration. (laughing) They basically didn’t get anything done, and if they had, then they would have been completely up a creek without a paddle. That’s the reality of this administration.

CLAY: I really don’t know, Buck, what’s gonna happen because I don’t think they’re gonna be able to pass anything in 2023 and ’24, and there’s a lot of you out there saying, “Hallelujah!” because if they do pass anything, it just means more governmental spending, which puts more inflationary pressure out there on the economy at large. So the best thing that could happen is nothing (laughing), which is a testament to how bad the Biden administration has been ’cause that’s where we are hoping now that the politicians basically can’t do anything.

BUCK: People forget that in the early days of the republic, D.C. was a malarial swamp, there was yellow fever and typhus and in the summertime —

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: — you and I have been been there in the summer, and it is not a malarial swamp, but it is very swampy in so many respects. They’d go home for months at a time. They’d be out of there. And you know what? The country didn’t melt down. We actually don’t need these people constantly doing things, usually telling us what to do and taking our money. That’s what they really excel at.

CLAY: Yeah. And that’s a bad feeling for a lot of people out there. Hopefully they’re not gonna be able to get that tax increase through, which they’ve been trying to ram through since Joe Biden got inaugurated.