836: The Big Rethink
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
A quick warning. There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. For three weeks, Joe Biden said as forcefully as a human being possibly could say that he would not step down. And for three weeks, it was this agonizing drip, drip, drip of people trying to get him to reconsider. And a voter around the country, wondering if he was going to reconsider, fed by a steady stream of daily news stories that read tea leaves and applied electron microscopes to the tiniest scraps of evidence, looking for any miniscule signs indicating that maybe it could happen, maybe Biden would rethink things, Democrats wondering what it might take to change Biden's mind. Meanwhile, over in the other half of the country, in Red State America, at the Republican National Convention, people who had changed their minds and reconsidered firmly held convictions were a big part of the festivities. Donald Trump picked his vice president, a man who once said about him, "My God, what an idiot?" J.D. Vance. Nikki Haley, who once called Trump "unhinged" and other former Trump rivals, people who once seemed like they hated Trump and spoken out against him, took the stage to show how they'd reconsidered. In Trump himself, the centerpiece of the whole thing seemed to be presenting himself as a changed man, somebody who had reconsidered who he wants to be in the wake of his near assassination, and presented a notably gentler, uniter, not divider, side of himself. All this reconsideration, of course, was in the service of getting the swing voters of the swing states to do some reconsideration of the round, about who they might be picking for president this fall. I sometimes feel like the rarest thing in the world is to witness somebody actually changing their mind. You know what I mean? Changing their mind about something big, some fundamental belief. Man, I know it happens, right? Most of us know people who are never going to have kids who decide they're going to go for it, or, you know, Democrats who became Republicans, pro-lifers who switched to pro-choicers. When it happens, it's a seismic thing. And that point of transition, when you're flipping from one way of seeing things to the new way, that is a weird, awkward thing to live through. And so a lay on our show, in this moment when Joe Biden seems to have reconsidered some of his most deeply held ideas about himself, and his chances in this election, we have stories of people rethinking some big, basic beliefs that they've taken for granted, trying on a new attitude toward the world, and we watch how it goes for them. From WBEZ, Chicago, to this American life, I'm in our glass, stay with us. Atquan, fade to the Union. For other people who'd rethought their feelings about Donald Trump, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week, it was one guest, for whom the rethink has been especially dramatic. And that's Sean O'Brien, a lefthong Democrat from Massachusetts, Sean O'Brien is the head of the Teamsters Union, 1.3 million truck drivers, rail, air, all transportation, delivery workers, lots of jobs, they endorsed Biden in 2020.
Transcription truncated.