Live from Music Row, Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed top gov tracker for One America News, Neil W. McCabe to the newsmaker line to comment on the recent speech made by Governor Ron DeSantis at the Reagan Library and what it means for his presidential candidacy.
Leahy: On the newspaper line right now top gov tracker, our very good friend, Neil W. McCabe. Neil, welcome to The Tennessee Star Report.
McCabe: Very good to be with you guys. Good morning.
Leahy: I understand you may have been traveling a little bit with top gov Ron DeSantis. Is it true that he went out to the Reagan Center and gave a speech?
McCabe: Yes, he did. He made a boss performance at the Reagan Library. And it’s not so much what he said, he basically said he’s had this sort of ongoing, how radio DJs would have this for the morning DJ and the afternoon DJ would have this feud.
That’s what he has going on with Governor Newsom of California. (Leahy laughs) So he put some logs on the fire there. What was really important was that he got the prompter guardian of the Reagan legacy, in which the Reagan people control the Reagan Foundation and then the archives run the library itself.
Just the fact that he got invited to the Reagan Library puts a presidential stamp on him, certainly with the Air Force One that’s right there in the museum of the Reagan Library. It was very much a presidential appearance forum.
Leahy: So the Reagan library is in Simi Valley, California. It’s in Southern California. Were you there in person or did you cover this on video?
McCabe: I covered it remotely. I put in a request to fly out there, but I think where our One American News mothership that is in San Diego, I think their attitude was pretty much, we’ll send somebody up from San Diego. We might send somebody local rather than drop a few grand on your little John.
Leahy: (Chuckles) Does DeSantis have an Air Force Florida One? Does he just fly commercial?
McCabe: The governor does have a jet. He’s used it to go outside the state like when he went to visit the border and things. And of course, he jets all over the state of Florida. And to be fair, it’s a big state, right? It’s not like Delaware. It’s a big state.
Leahy: Or you can walk around Delaware.
McCabe: Exactly. Yes, you can walk, you can drive through. It just costs you $25 a toll. I think that DeSantis probably maybe got a ride with a donor. Who knows.
Leahy: So his book is out. He hasn’t announced yet. I don’t think he can announce until I think there’s a little bit of legislation that has to be passed.
McCabe: There’s a law.
Leahy: Tell us about that.
McCabe: He has to resign if he runs for president.
Carmichael: And they’re changing that law. Yes.?
McCabe: They’re gonna try to and he won’t comment. Whatever they want to do, they want to do. Obviously, he wants that law to change pretty quickly. What’s absolutely delicious is that the Republican leaders of the legislature put incredible pressure on lawmakers not to file a pro-life bill this session, which opened yesterday and goes on for the next two months.
Any bill to be considered had to be filed before the session began. It begins with the governor’s state of the state address. And so minutes before the governor gave his address, which of course is the deadline, two guys filed a six-week ban on abortion or a heartbeat bill and no one saw it coming.
And it was completely stealthy. Now the governor is on record at a press conference saying that he would sign a six-week heartbeat bill. And I’m proud to say that I’m the knucklehead who asked the governor that question. And that’s the tape that’s running all over the place when people say, hey, it’s gonna pass.
And so the question now is, does the governor push for this thing or not? If the six-week bill doesn’t pass, the governor has a difficult time explaining how it doesn’t pass. If he said he’d sign it, if he said he’s a pro-life governor, everything else he wants he gets.
Because the whole reason why we want DeSantis and not someone else is that DeSantis wins and because DeSantis gets things done. And so if he couldn’t get this done, I think it’s a chink in the ammo.
Carmichael: What’s the current law on abortion in Florida?
McCabe: It’s 15 weeks now. And that’s pretty much the limit. That’s the big-time Republican donors will go to 15 weeks.
Leahy: We look at this and he is doing his book tour with The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival. We expect probably he’ll announce in June.
Carmichael: Neil, I’m assuming that they did drop a bill that allows DeSantis to be governor and run at the same time?
McCabe: Correct.
Carmichael: So that bill has been dropped.
McCabe: Correct.
Leahy: All the talk is, Trump-DeSantis, Trump coming up with nicknames for Meatball Ron or Ron Des Sanctimonious. Apparently, he’s got a focus group deciding what nickname he should use. There are some policy differences to think about. President Trump has made it clear that the Ukraine war is a debacle with $100 billion going there.
The Secretary of Treasury going to Ukraine, the attorney general going to Ukraine and the president going to Ukraine. None of ’em going to the East Palestine environmental debacle in Ohio. I do think though that President Trump is very clear that he wants the war in Ukraine ended. He said give me 24 hours; I’ll end it.
Is there a policy difference on Ukraine between DeSantis who actually served in the military as a JAG, but still he served in the military and Trump when it comes to Ukraine?
McCabe: Yes, he served as a JAG, and he was in Iraq during the surge. And Iraq, whether you were a lawyer or a clerk or kicking down doors, Iraq, especially during that time, was a very easy place to get killed if you weren’t paying attention.
Leahy: And by the way, let us say Sergeant Neil W. McCabe received a bronze star for his service to the United States of America in the Army in Iraq. I just wanted to point that out, Sergeant McCabe.
McCabe: I was there two years later, and even then, it was a very easy place to get killed if you weren’t paying attention. And frankly when people jack things up, and people don’t have their equipment straight, sometimes in the back of my head, I’m thinking are you trying to get me killed? Which is a reaction normal civilians don’t have.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Ron DeSantis” by Ron DeSantis.
Live from Music Row, Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Top Gov Tracker Neil W. McCabe of One America News to the newsmaker line to comment on President Biden’s State of the Union Address, Ron DeSantis’s personal history, and South Carolina as Democratic primary election state.
Leahy: Right now on the newsmaker line, Top Gov Tracker, our very good friend, the One American News Network national political correspondent, and formerly the lead political correspondent nationally for The Star News Network, Mr. Neil W. McCabe. Good morning, Neil.
McCabe: Michael, very good to be with you, sir.
Leahy: Last night we had an hour and a half of a very old angry man slurring and attacking everybody who wasn’t a left-wing Democrat. What was your reaction to this?
McCabe: It was a strong speech because there was no compromise. And if the only thing you ever did was tune into the State of the Union every year, like those Christmas and Easter Catholics, you would think everything’s fantastic. There was no compromise on guns. The Republicans are a bunch of insurrectionists who tried to kill that old guy sitting next to Bono. (Leahy laughs)
Ukraine is America. The Dreamers are finally going to get a shot. It’s a very interesting tact that Biden has always taken. He always gives a speech where he expresses an empathy for the concerns of his audience. But he doesn’t compromise on policy. He never compromises on policy. And that was forceful.
On abortion, immigration, and the border, he’s all-in. But what he didn’t expect was that some Republicans just couldn’t take it anymore. And they basically called him a liar. When he was talking about fentanyl, they’d say, hey, what about the border? When he said, we may need oil and gas for another 10 years, they just started laughing at him.
Leahy: You know the best line I saw on that, Neil? I’m not a fan of this guy, but Jonah Goldberg with The Dispatch said, yeah, and we also may need air and water for the next 10 years. (Chuckles)
McCabe: Almost half of the House Republicans have been elected since 20116. People talk about the need for term limits. It just so happens that in the Republican Party, there is natural turnover because guys have careers and guys have other things they want to do, and things turn over a lot more than people expect, at least on the Republican conference side.
You have all of these guys who have been elected in the age of Trump, and it’s like Biden wasn’t talking their language. It was bizarre. Sometimes he was playing to the room, sometimes he was playing to the TV and I don’t know what the effect would be.
Leahy: The interesting response came from Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders from Arkansas. It was a dramatic contrast. A couple of things on that. First, she highlighted the fact that she’s 40 years old and he’s 80 years old. And then she said this. She said, it’s not a choice between Republicans and Democrats, it’s a choice between normal and crazy. I thought that was pretty effective.
McCabe: There is an axis in American politics of crazy and not crazy. And when I was at Capitol Hill, I got a little bit of it when I was covering the White House. A lot of the White House reporters that I fully expected to be like Bolsheviks, socialists, and hardcore, they’re not. In a lot of ways, the White House reporters aren’t political at all.
The White House reporters don’t care if somebody wants the drug test, food stamp recipients, or any of this stuff. They’re not involved in policy. It’s crazy. Not crazy. You saw that yesterday with Governor Ron DeSantis when he had that round table.
And one of the people he invited to his roundtable was Libby Locke, who’s the lawyer suing on behalf of Dominion. She’s suing Rudy Giuliani. She’s suing Mike Lindell. He’s suing a bunch of people. And DeSantis, by putting himself with Libby Locke, he’s saying, I’m in the not crazy lane.
And so the idea is, can we have conservatism without the crazy? And I think that’s going to be DeSantis’s pitch. The same thing with Biden last night. The Republicans are insurrectionists. The Republicans are insane. It’s not politics. They’re violent, they’re extreme. Biden’s attitude was, I don’t even know why they’re in this room.
Leahy: It’s interesting, speaking of Governor Ron DeSantis since you are the Top Gov Tracker. The old saying is if generals try to win the next war with the tactics of the previous war, it doesn’t end well.
Former President Donald Trump yesterday went out and started attacking again. The unannounced candidate, Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, put out a picture, I don’t know, 20 years ago, that showed Ron DeSantis in his 20s surrounded in a party atmosphere by a bunch of younger girls.
Other than that, there was a picture of DeSantis with some teenage girls, I don’t know what was there, but Trump was attacking him for that. Someone who’s been sued by Stormy Daniels and didn’t seem like a good tactic to me. Your thoughts?
McCabe: I guess when The Washington Post and The New York Times have both run articles talking about how when Ron DeSantis in the year after Yale had spent a year teaching at a private school, and he was like a 22, a 23-year-old teacher would party with some of the students. And that’s been out there.
I guess when Trump says it, he’s being outrageous. But when The New York Times and The Washington Post write about it, they’re being responsible. I think that your real point is correct. People don’t care about someone’s personal life as long as they vote correctly. If they think Ron DeSantis is going to deliver a future that lines up with their interests, they will vote for him. Remember, Grover Cleveland was elected President of the United States after it came out he had an illegitimate daughter, His Baby Ruth candy bar was created by the Republicans to make fun of his illegitimate daughter Ruth. 150 years ago, people were willing to elect a guy to be president of the United States with an illegitimate daughter because they thought he was going to be a president that delivered a future that lined up with their interests.
Leahy: Let’s talk a little bit about the 2024 race on the Democrat side. The Democrats now are saying we don’t care about Iowa or New Hampshire because they don’t represent the United States of America, the electorate. That’s what James Clyburn said.
He’s the black congressman from South Carolina. But now because South Carolina delivered for Joe Biden back in 2020, they are making South Carolina the first primary in the country. Your thoughts on this?
McCabe: It’s a bold move, but maybe it had to be done. I’ve covered Iowa. Iowa is a bear. It’s wicked cold. It’s wicked cold.
Leahy: I know it is. I was there in 2020. You’re right. I can confirm it was wicked cold.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
