August 4th, 2020 – Second Reading Podcast

[0:00:00 Speaker 1] welcome to the second reading podcast from the University of Texas at Austin. The Republicans were

[0:00:07 Speaker 0] in the Democratic Party because there was only

[0:00:10 Speaker 1] one party. So I tell people on a regular basis there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called Texas. The problem is these departures from the Constitution. They have become the norm. At

[0:00:24 Speaker 0] what point must a female senator raised her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the

[0:00:30 Speaker 1] room? Hello and welcome to the second reading podcast for the week of August 3rd. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin this week. I’m happy to welcome Jonathan Thailand, chief political writer of the Austin American Statesman, back to the podcast today. Jonathan, how are you this week?

[0:00:53 Speaker 0] I’m good. Thanks for having me. Always a

[0:00:55 Speaker 1] pleasure. Thanks for being here now. Jonathan had ah long piece in the Austin American Statesman that was published in the paper Sunday, and I guess on the Web probably slightly before that, there was called Facing a Crisis. Abbott charts a lonely middle course. Um, as always, Jonathan, you ranged widely in that story in terms of sourcing and interviewed several sources for this story. But it stood out in part because you got some one on one time with the governor. So let’s start with that story. Why don’t you tell me a little about what you mean by this lonely middle course? What is Abbott navigating between? And why is he so lonely?

[0:01:38 Speaker 0] Well, he’s, um, he’s lonely because his his his polling numbers are very low. So, um, you know, there they haven’t been this low in his political career, so it’s self evidently lonely. But it’s also because, um, there are very loud voices on both sides of him who are critical of him. So the Democratic Party has been critical of him from the start for not doing enough and for essentially having, you know, people’s deaths on his hands and then ah, minority, but a very vocal minority of the Republican Party, which actually controls the sort of state thes sort of activist network that people the recent state convention. I think that he’s going way too far, and that he’s trampled on their liberties with mass quarters and other executive actions, and they selected as their new state party chair, Allen West, who has spent his time saying that Abbott’s actions or that of, Ah, a bit of a tyrant so that makes for a lonely existence, because there’s no one really out there amplifying his voice. He’s, um he’s on TV every day, being the voice for his path. But it’s It’s not one that you hear seconded all over the place

[0:02:58 Speaker 1] now you in the interview that it’s covered in this story that you actually asked him about, the the pretty harsh language that that Allen West has used about the governor. And, you know, he he was fairly well, I’ll let you characterize it, but he you know, I mean, you know, in a crude sort of way he didn’t take the bait of your question, but he you know, But he wasn’t very combative about it, all right?

[0:03:27 Speaker 0] No, I not taking the bait is his modus operandi, and it’s, you know, it’s frustrating for a reporter, but you step back and you go that it’s it’s a very smart strategy. From his point of view, there is not much to be gained, um, from taking the bait. There’s not much to be gained by getting in a fight with With Allen West and the the hard core of his party’s grassroots, there’s not much to be gained by getting in a fight with or showing any kind of dissent from the Trump path. So while you know, it was, it was for one question after another, him saying things that seem non responsive or not, particularly from the heart. It all made perfect sense from his point of view, and I think he’s as good as it gets at not answering questions in ways that don’t get him in trouble.

[0:04:22 Speaker 1] Well, I’m gonna put a pin in that we started with for a second and come back toe his interview style. But I, you know, maybe showed my hand by jumping right on the politics of the relationship between the governor and the and the the new, the newly elected chair of the Texas Republican Party. But I wanna go back and have you tell us a little bit about how the governor expressed his policy position, particularly on the on the pandemic. Obviously, you know, this has been front and center for the governor since the pandemic started in the United States and and we knew it was only a matter of time before it got to Texas, and it’s certainly here now. But, you know, tell me how you how the governor responded to questions about where he is taking the state or where he’s trying to lead this state in terms of the pandemic response. Because obviously that’s that’s the main issue in front of him. And it’s the It’s one in which there’s been a lot of speculation about where Greg Abbott, you know, quote unquote, really is on the issue because he has been responding to, you know, all of these sort of different criticisms and all of these different constituencies, as you were saying a minute ago. So you know how you know it was. You walk away from that interview and and thinking about how you portrayed in this story, how would you characterize where the governor is on handling the pandemic right now? Given all the cross currents, particularly as you mentioned the the approach coming out of the White House?

[0:05:58 Speaker 0] Um, yeah, well, I think, uh, Abbott is at pains to, um, portray his path as steady, consistent, um, following the advice of, um doctors and scientists and public health concerns, but at the same time trying Thio keep to revive, reopen and maintain the strength of the Texas economy, which is really what his guiding light is throughout his administration. Its’s the power and strength of the Texas economy that defines what he thinks is his achievements as governor and what makes Texas stand out. So the problem he has politically is that I think, um, for as long as things were going okay, he got credit. But as soon as things got bad here, he was portrayed as nothing but a Trump clone who was a victim. Now we’re not a victim, but who was boxed in by his loyalty to the president and was not conducting himself any differently than the president. And I think that’s where I think it’s a bit unfair, because I think he has been for, you know, since around a little before July 4th been on TV everyday, imploring people to wear their masks and ultimately mandating that they wear masks and and telling people that this is dire and that they have to take it seriously and they have to change their behavior on If they want to keep the economy open, they’re going toe. Have thio. That’s a message that if Trump were consisting consistently delivering it, there’d be a very different appraisal of Trump. At the same time, Abbott has never done anything to publicly cross Trump Thio. Give Trump any reason Thio Thio disparage him, which is, you know, kind of a low threshold. It doesn’t take a whole lot to get the president to do that, even to an ally. So I think it’s, I think part of it is that you you could miss, take what he’s doing for being simply a replica Trump. If you don’t look more closely, and I think the politics of it are that people don’t necessarily want to give him credit for what he does, that’s more proactive. And it’s different than Trump’s behavior. And I think you’ve written about how you and Josh, about the need for him to kind of sees that space because the public health depends on it. Um, at the same time, I do think that you know, he he’s at pains to make it look like he’s He’s a had this very steady course along and I think obviously has had to make adjustments. He opened bars and then closed bars. He thought, um, he resisted mask orders until he imposed one. So But I think that’s you know, that’s to his credit, that he hasn’t been locked in on these things and that he has made adjustments when he’s had, too.

[0:09:12 Speaker 1] I mean, it sounds to me, and I know you and I have talked about this before. Like on one hand. You think it’s fair, You know that? The criticism I should I should even call it the criticism. Although it is in some ways theon survey Shin that he has been extremely mindful of avoiding Trump’s ire is accurate. Um, I e Do you agree with that?

[0:09:38 Speaker 0] Yes, I think that that, um, yes, I think the last thing he needs or wants is to be criticized by the president At the same time. I don’t think that he is, um, every day trying to curry favor with the president. I think he’s that’s

[0:09:56 Speaker 1] somebody else’s job. I think in Steak

[0:09:57 Speaker 0] Oven. Exactly. He’s not gonna be out. He’s gonna be out done there. So his his his path is to is to avoid the wrath of Trump while at the same time as much as possible, Um, actually trying to come up with an outcome that Z he has to live with. The result here, it seems, in some ways, that the president feels as long as there’s someone else to blame and governors are good choices for that. He’s less concerned about the ultimate outcome than he is about who who gets the blame or the credit. Whereas I think Abbott realizes that he will live with these results for the rest of his political career, that this is his defining moment and that the fate of Texas rests in the balance.

[0:10:45 Speaker 1] Yeah, I think that, you know, on one hand I’m hesitating, So I’m hesitant to go too far down the road of trying toe really analyze the governor, you know, a sort of, you know, personal way too deeply. But I do want to go back a little bit, and you know, you got this opportunity to talk to the governor. You talked to him for a while, it sounded like, and let’s go a little behind the scenes with the interview. Um, and you started to talk about this, but I wanna I wanna give you a little more space to elaborate. This is obviously not your first time talking to the governor. But, you know, in this interview, what was he like? Is an interview subject than you know, You were just talking about some of his I don’t remember what word and I don’t wanna put words in your mouth. But you know what sounded like a certain evasiveness or when? Almost kind of relentless on message nous to his responses to your questions. Um, talk a little bit about that. And I’m curious whether you think he’s always been like that. Is this in other times you’ve interviewed him. Is this, um, adjustment to the current difficulties season? Talk about all that? A little.

[0:11:59 Speaker 0] Um, no, he is. Um I don’t know what I should say famously, but he is. He is a very, very difficult interview. If what you’re trying to do is to get news out of that interview, unless it’s the news that he wants to tell you. And so sometimes I have interviewed him at the beginning or the end of the session in the middle of a session or something middle of some other crisis where he has something that he wants to tell me. And then, you know, it’s quickly apparent what the what the news is, what the headline, what the lead of the story is, and you know, you could sort of fill out the rest of it. In this case I was. The agenda here for me was to kind of do a six month check in after writing something just before he opened the not quite six months. But just in April, just before he reopened, and how how consequential this was gonna be, kind of look back and say, Okay, so how’s it going? And for lots of obvious reasons, because of the resurgence of the the virus and his own plummeting political fortunes, it’s not a good time. So I was looking for the governor to make some assessment of things he did well or didn’t do as well and some introspection, and they’re really that’s not something he does. And that’s not something that is really profitable for him to do. If I kind of look at it clear eyed. But when I finished, I knew that it was gonna be tough to get, Um, yeah, answers. But when it was over, I was kind of in despair because I looked and I said, There’s I don’t have anything. There’s nothing. There’s nothing here but but to my credit I wrote 3000 words based on that, and it really wasn’t a vacuum because he’s everything he’s doing has a purpose. And eso, you know, ultimately I think, and a zoo you mentioned. I talked a lot of other people, so I saw, you know, I think that’s part of this middle path. This loneliness is that he’s crafting these answers that they’re trying not thio, uh, create greater problems from, you know, just one note in language. When I asked him about Allen West, he said, We chit chat of the other day. Well, the use of the word chit chat was like, I don’t know whether that was brilliant or ridiculous, because here’s a guy who’s who’s undermining. That’s what I said to him. I said, What’s it like having a state chairman who’s undercutting your authority? One? Oh, I don’t think so. You know, like like oh, why would you think that when it’s perfectly obvious? And then he said we chitchat of the other day. This is when they both were with Trump in Midland. And I just thought that was kind of great because it was like, how casual, How chummy is chit chat and it you know how, But But the whole purpose here was I’ll deal with him another day. I’m not gonna tell you what I’m doing, and you’re never gonna find out what I’m doing unless it’s, you know, by inference

[0:14:59 Speaker 1] so well, this’ll is pretty baked in to a certain degree, right? In the sense that you know when when I hear you describe well, the governor is not gonna answer my questions. He he’s got a message and he is going to stick to that message. He’s kind of doing his job. And you’re doing your job by trying Thio to not just get the message right,

[0:15:22 Speaker 0] Right? And you know, the extra, uh um burden on me was that, you know, the complaint from, you know, the reporting, you know, newspaper reporters around the state is that he’s not accessible, that he no longer really even does these press briefings. When he did them, they were, you know, a pool or just a couple of reporters present. And yet he’s on with TV News six or seven times a day. Um, around the state, that’s how he communicates. And he goes on for four or five minutes and talks about the covitz story of the day and what’s happening. And if appeal to the the citizens Texas. And I think you know there’s a sense. Oh, that’s that’s softball stuff and that’s not been my experience. My experience is that his his questioning by local news anchors is pretty aggressive and sharp because there’s a lot of concerns about what’s going on and there they feel compelled to directly ask him questions, and he cannot dismiss what they’re saying because they’re sort of surrogates for his constituents in a very kind of concrete way. And it’s live on TV, Um, talking to me, asking him to think about more broadly about you know, what he did right in what he did wrong. That’s a whole different category of questions and ones that he has more reason not to answer and that he’s more skillful and not answering. So you know, I might. My feeling was G I. I hear I got a half hour, which is not a lot, but it’s more than others have gotten. And did I somehow blow it or squander it? Because I did not exact from him something, um, sensational or you know, totally what people hadn’t expected or hadn’t heard before.

[0:17:09 Speaker 1] Well, I don’t want to cultivate your despair anymore than you’ve already expressed, but, um, you know, I do wanna I mean, I wanna ask you then if somebody has been in in journalism for a long time. I mean, it’s an interesting dynamic that that you’re referring to here in terms of the pushback against the media strategy that the governor and his team have chosen over the last few weeks. You know, much fewer kind of open, general, you know, broadly speaking, kind of statewide focused press events and and briefings. And a lot mawr kind of targeted hits on a lot more targeted hits toe local media markets. He’s got a lot of pushback from the you know what we used to call the print media and the dailies on that strategy. Um, it feels to me like some of that push back and not all of it, but some of that push back really does lay bare a kind of biased inside. Well, you know, I shouldn’t say inside among print media, about local, about local television news and and a kind of assumption that it’s always gonna be lighter weight than, you know, the Mork quote unquote serious journalism that happens at the dailies or, you know, the, you know, new media, You know that obviously, in Texas, the example would be the Tribune. Um, you know that, you know, you shared some of the recordings you made of some of those television briefings, which I appreciate, and I’ve watched a lot of them on the Internet and the local once he’s done here, and and I well, I think that the quality of some of those interviews is is a little sometimes uneven. Some of them are very aggressive. So I’m wondering how you you know, how you kind of assess that strategy, I mean, is the, you know, on the governor’s part, I mean, do you think that you know, he’s obligated to do as much media as he can into somehow divide his time between Mawr statewide media and and these local television strategies I mean, you know, you were I mean, I think you you were positive about the job that a lot of the local the local TV journalists are doing. But I’m wondering if you step back how you assess the overall strategy and its implications.

[0:19:41 Speaker 0] Well, this has been his strategy from the day he took office. So he was always, um um, avoiding a lot of interviews with newspapers and, you know, the other outlets you talked about and preferring to just do these hits either with talk radio friendly talk radio or with the local stations. And I think when when he wasn’t in the middle of a pandemic, the kind of thio, the degree to which that’s kind of an avoidance strategy became very apparent. And a lot of times those interviews didn’t produce much, except for the governor kind of flattering the local people and and building his political support. I think now it’s different because he really is. You know, this is not, you know, Andrew Cuomo would have this daily briefing, and obviously Trump does what Trump does. But his method was this and I thought it showed a certain amount of fortitude because he’s he is talking more directly to people. In that way. He’s he is delivering sometimes a grim message. And he is. He is getting very, very direct questions about whether it’s the opening of schools that are that are, you know, with follow up questions saying You’re you know, this has been confused and you’re not clear and what’s going on and why should we believe this? And so I think that’s all. To his credit, I think you know, the difference is that the these outlets may be less likely Thio to step back and do longer stories or, you know, kind of analyzing his leadership over a period of time and that, you know, I’d like to think he owes it to the broader public also to do interviews with the more traditional outlets, which he avoids, because I think he’s the settled opinion was that they were less friendly to him. But so, you know, I’d like to see both, but I think the idea that this regimen he he’s going through of talking toe local um, TV is some kind of free ride or picnic for him is not at all accurate.

[0:21:57 Speaker 1] Yeah, I mean, I wonder to some extent if, um, there isn’t a little bit of a lag in their adjustment of that media strategy. Me, I’d be curious, Um, you know, and and honestly, you know, to the extent that the model in other states does seem to have been more frequent kind of statewide briefings focused, you know, very, very intently on the on the on the pandemic And, you know, to try to, you know, have ah kind of constant kind of rhythm of these things when things are bad. Now, you know, I mean, I think everybody doesn’t have to do what Andrew Cuomo did in New York, but for better for worse, that did become something of the model I wanna before we move on from the interview a little bit. I wanna ask you that kind of what you left on the editing room floor in that interview. You, you know, talk to the governor for about a half hour. It sounds like you had a lot of quotes in this story, but certainly not a half hour’s worth what? You know, what were some of the interesting things you didn’t use? That people might be interested in.

[0:23:08 Speaker 0] Um, well, there were a couple of things I had, you know, one of the one of them are curious. Moments of this whole thing has been in the case of Shelley Luther, who was the Dallas head of Dallas hair salon who opened up ahead of schedule and ultimately was jailed. And this was in violation of, uh, abbots orders, keeping those barbershops and salons closed for a longer period of time at a safety concerns on a soon as she was put in jail, the entire Texas political establishment stood on its head and contorted itself in whatever manner they could to help her. So Dan Patrick offered Thio do her jail time for her or for a novel legal theory. There, he, um, offered to pay her fine. Sean Hannity also offered to pay her fine. Um, Ted Cruz flew to her salon to get a haircut, and Greg Abbott essentially countermanded his own order, saying no one should go to jail for this. So I had talked to her earlier in the day to get her opinion of Governor Abbott, which is remains pretty low. Um, and I asked him about it because I wondered whether he felt, in retrospect, that maybe he undermined his message by going to such lengths to defend someone and set a tone that ultimately produced proved counterproductive. And again, he was No, he would have none of that. He thought that she should never have been put in jail for that, that there was an inconsistency in the application of justice in Dallas County and that he behaved perfectly appropriately. Um, you know, to me, that was, um that was an indication of the power of a relatively small but vocal minority within the Republican Party. And she remains a, you know, very popular figure who I think will run for office at some point and, you know, probably be successful. So that was that was interesting to me, to the degree in which he he’s not ready yet to say, Well, maybe that didn’t look great. Um,

[0:25:30 Speaker 1] well, in terms of the way that he is having to manage the politics, it’s probably fair to also note that, you know, that was not a spontaneous decision by Shelley Luther, right? By all indications, there was, you know, there was some planning that went into that and some backing by organized, you know, interest in that sector of the party, which is increasingly giving the governor trouble, right?

[0:25:54 Speaker 0] Well, I don’t know so much about that. What I do know is that she is now kind of advising bar owners who are thinking of who are staging their own kind of protests about bars being closed. So she’s she’s in that sense, not going away.

[0:26:11 Speaker 1] Yeah. So she wasn’t sure if she if she wasn’t, then she is now,

[0:26:17 Speaker 0] I think. Well, yeah, I don’t I don’t know her have I can’t really speak to the broader agenda there, but I do know that she’s she’s committed to this in a way that’s gonna be ongoing.

[0:26:33 Speaker 1] You know, one of the one of the things that was interesting in this story that that did make it in was, uh, the governor’s comments about how he is listening to the health professionals, the doctors and the scientists, Um and and And that that is, you know what is driving his approach to this? And we’ve seen this now come up a couple of times. I mean, a few weeks ago when, uh, without getting into the weeds too much the story in The New York Times that suggested that you know the governor was talking mawr to the vice president than the president, but that he was also talking to Dr Berks. Um, and too to a lesser degree at the time, to Dr Fauci. Um, this this idea of of who he’s taking medical, who is taking advice from in particular scientific and medical advice also came up in some of the stuff that you didn’t use. Right,

[0:27:30 Speaker 0] Right, So So, yeah, I mean, well, first with Berks, she’s and she’s out, you know, he’s been listening to her consistently. She’s been supportive with time sort of analysis of all this was that she had fallen victim. The happy talking wasn’t really in touch with what was going on. Now she’s apparently much more concerned and worried about where things were headed and Trump’s attacked her. So, you know, one day she’s in. One day she’s out, then she’s back in, and then she’s back out. So the thing is that he’s also taking advice from There were four doctors who who he was particularly taking advice from, and they included John’s Jarawas and who was a former state rep and a physiologist, Um, and Dr Heller, Stat who’s the head of health and Human Services. And, uh, Mark McClellan, who is uh, formerly from Texas from a Texas political family. But is was the former head of the F D. A. And had a very good reputation and had done much of the sort of models for how you how you approach a pandemic like this. And I’ve talked him a few times. And while he is positive about Abbott listening to him and, you know, trying to balance various interests, he has been hesitant. He has not said that they that he signed off on when he opened. Exactly, and he thought a Z accelerated the opening, that it was a little too much too soon that they didn’t have the testing and contact tracing up to speed. And when I asked uh, Abbott about this, he was adamant. He pushed back and he said No. These doctors signed off on the way we reopened and I thought, Well, that’s kind of inconsistent, Um, but then I looked at the way he said it, and you know things. Point’s been made often that Greg Abbott is a lawyer, judge, Supreme Court, Justice and attorney general. And I think what he was saying was the protocols that they required businesses to adhere to when they opened our what the doctors signed off on, not the decision to reopen exactly the way he did. So I think I think I think that’s what’s going on here is I think he’s He’s giving a very precise definition of what they signed off on, and I don’t think that they were out there screaming. You know you’re doing the wrong thing. But I also don’t think it’s fair for him to say, um, you know every step of the way I was doing what the doctors told me, and I think he’s. Even while he in this conversation talked about following the science and talk listening to the doctors, he usedto reel off the names of the doctors who he was listening to hear. Uh, and he doesn’t invoke their name as often as he used to. So I think he’s recognized that maybe he shouldn’t be pressing that quite a strongly, particularly in the case of Dr McClellan.

[0:30:33 Speaker 1] So, in a in a lot of ways, this, um, yeah, well, you asked that? A different Yes, it’s a different way. So, you know, in the end, I mean, that feels a little bit to me partially, like being politically careful on the part of the governor on the part of the governor, but also falls within the pattern of saying we’re gonna We’re gonna be specific and we’re going thio send messages and and, you know, to some extent issue executive orders. I mean, and and and it’s up to you guys to kind of figure out what we mean. Is that unfair?

[0:31:11 Speaker 0] No. And that’s precisely what happened with his mask order with, uh, Nelson Wolff, the the county judge in Bear County, where he was saying, no mask or no mask water. And then I guess it was maybe John Whitman or someone on the staff who said, Well, if you read the executive order very carefully and I find something there and they realized that they could tell businesses they had Thio invoked the mass quarters, even if they couldn’t. And when Nelson Wolff Nelson will told me, Well, yeah, I kind of figured it out and took the signal and did it. And the governor uh came back and supported me and said, You’re a genius for having or not a genius. You’re the one who carefully read my order Now on Lee A. You know Supreme Court justice or jurors would think that the way that you implement public policy is by writing something and expecting that someone will carefully analyzed the exact language and come to certain conclusions that you intended them to find but did not want to articulate, even though you’re the governor of the state.

[0:32:17 Speaker 1] And I think that in a lot of ways really underlines the why. There is some difficulty here, you know, toe oversimplify. But there, you know, there is a sense of kind of a degree of one way communication here that I think is occasionally get just getting them in trouble and to some degree causing unnecessary grief in terms of the approach, you know, I mean, I was struck in in your interview by the degree to which, in context, some of you know the things that the governor said sounded, you know, precisely right, and almost devoid of the kind of politics that are clearly at work nonetheless. I mean, there’s there’s a passage in this story in which he’s talking about the degree to which, you know, this is a very fluid environment, that science works imperfectly. We think one thing for a while, and then we find something out and we have to change course. And, you know, that seems perfectly plausible. The only problem is that, given the way that it’s been handled, it sounds like they are simply laying the groundwork for having shifted courses. Um, not because of the vagaries of science, but because of the politics.

[0:33:37 Speaker 0] Yeah, I think that’s e think that’s exactly right. And I think, you know, I mean less. I forget The most obvious example of this was when he issued his stay at home order and I would not describe it and denied that it was a stay at home order. And it was as a reporter writing this on deadline. I think every all the other reporters were figuring it out that he just issued a stay at home order, which he said was and so how exactly do you write what it is that he just did? Because he’s denying what it is he just did. And by the next day, he wanted it to be a stay at home order because he wanted people to know that he was doing, um, the same thing that New York and California were doing in terms of locking things down. But he did not want everyone to know that right away. E

[0:34:29 Speaker 1] think they certainly didn’t want the headlights to say the headlines in the state to say Texas follows New York and California, right?

[0:34:36 Speaker 0] Exactly. But well, except that he wanted half half the state and half the nation to know that any one of the other half not to know it. And you know you can’t do that. And so he’s trying Thio that you can’t resolve. And I do think that speaks Thio the problem that you’re describing, which is, I mean, somewhere in this story I had, you know James Huffines, who’s the former U T region who eyes the chair of his strike force re opening Texas and is a very kind of, you know, moderate in tone and politics guy. And he said, Well, I admire the governor because what I’ve discovered in great leaders is, you know, his humility is what stands out because of his And so his ability to to reverse course on, uh, masks, um, and to reverse course on the bars showed character. Yeah, but Abbott still is not one who’s like he’s not about expressing humility or or defining or articulating his mistakes very often. And I think what you were seeing there was, yes, things were changing. And I’m also trying Thio maintain the impression that I’m one step ahead of this every step of the way. And then I am guided Onley by, um, results. And, you know, I think what I think. What critics lose sight of is the fact that you know, the Texas economy does matter to a lot of people. And there’s there’s two crises here so that a single minded, exclusive focus on the public health crisis as it pertains to the spread of coronavirus doesn’t entail every piece of the crisis that air facing Texans, even from a public health standpoint.

[0:36:41 Speaker 1] Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think that, you know, the overall discourse is beginning. Thio move ever so slightly away from this thing either the economy or the coronavirus thinking and becoming a little more multidimensional and systemic in that way, but it’s complicated. It’s hard to do that. People, you know it is. You know, a lot of people say I sound like Trump, but has been, you know, researched extensively. Uh, people don’t think very clearly about complex systems because they’re hard to think about. And that’s part of what’s going on there. Um, Jonathan, I want to thank you for being here. I appreciate it. Thank you. And thanks for sharing. Uh, some of this stuff that didn’t go into the paper. Um, that’s helpful. Eso thanks to Jonathan, thanks to our staff liberal are in the liberal arts development studio at UT Austin. As always, you can find more data and analysis at the Texas Politics Project Website, Texas politics dot utexas dot e d u. This week, we’ve updated our presidential poll tracker with some recent numbers from the morning. Consult. Uh, there’s a new analysis of public opinion on mail in voting and Thean Pact of President Trump’s messaging on that, and much more so thanks for listening. Thanks again to Jonathan, and we’ll be back next week. The second reading podcast is a production of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.