Live from Music Row Friday 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 the original all-star panelist, Crom Carmichael to the studio to discuss historian Jon Meacham’s inaccurate prediction of the Presidential debates held Thursday night in Nashville, Tennessee.
(Jon Meacham clip plays)
Because the contrast what’s going to be vivid on the stage tonight I think is you’re going to have a bombastic bullying, clearly out of his depth incumbent talking over and trying to bully both the moderator and the Democratic nominee and the Democratic nominee. And the Democratic nominee is not outside the American mainstream. In many ways, he is the mainstream Joe Biden is a center-left figure. If not a centrist figure, you know?
He’s totally explicable and understandable in terms of new deal through Obama politics. And that’s great and that has its vices too. And one of the reasons Donald Trump is President is because people found that conversation and that culture to be incommensurate to their challenges and their needs in a global era. Okay, but we can have that conversation. Right? That’s it. We don’t need to go to reality show Berlitz classes to try to understand that. We understand what Biden is saying.
Leahy: Well Crom, that’s the eminent historian Jon Meacham who lives in Nashville.
Carmichael: Yeah.
Leahy: He was yes, he was predicting yesterday what was going to happen the debate. That’s not at all what happened. What what was the key word that you use to describe Jon Meacham?
Carmichael: Historian. He looks backwards. He’s yeah, he looks backwards. And so for him he lives in the rearview mirror. He’s very good at it by the way, and he writes wonderful books. But his ability to prognosticate is right along there along with Jeffrey Toobin’s. (Laughter)
Leahy: He said last night that the president would be a bombastic bully clearly out of his depth trying to bully both the moderator and the Democratic nominee. I didn’t see any bullying last night.
Carmichael: No. Jon Meacham was completely wrong, completely.
Leahy: Totally and completely wrong.
Carmichael: And he regularly is wrong, but his ability to tell you what happened in the past is pretty good. Now he is incorrect about Joe Biden and who Joe Biden is, and that is he says he is a centrist.
Leahy: He says he’s mainstream.
Carmichael: Yeah, and that’s false too. Joe Biden wants to raise taxes to the highest level since the 70s. That’s not centrist. Joe Biden wants to do away with the energy industry and fossil fuels. And he wants to do away with it in 2025. That’s in what four years? He wants to he wants to eliminate the entire industry. Jon Meacham as you know, I don’t know, is pot legal here in Tennessee for other than for medicinal purposes?
Leahy: He was he was just not he was really in possession of his many of his mental faculties.
Carmichael: He’s kind of right in there with Joe Biden, I think so. Kind of a doddering historian now. But we’re happy to have him come on here though and explain how he gets things so wrong. You know, he didn’t even mention the single biggest issue that came up last night. And that is that Biden takes money from foreign governments.
Leahy: China.
Carmichael: And the biggest one is China. And by the way the media covering up for it is even a bigger story than the story itself. But we’ll see. Meacham may have the last laugh, but I don’t think he will. I think Meacham thinks that Biden will win. I think Meacham’s wrong. But you know what this is kind of like a football game coming up this Saturday. There’s going to be a winner and there’s going to be a loser. And we’re going to have an election here soon.
Leahy: So Jon Meacham you live here in Nashville. Just so you know, we want to invite him. We want to invite the doddering eminent historian who looks backwards well but can’t look forward well; can’t recognize reality. So doddering eminent historian Jon Meacham, you are welcome to come in here and prove us wrong.
Carmichael: Prove us wrong. (Laughter)
Leahy: And I’m not holding my breath for him to come in here.
Carmichael: But he’ll be on CNN again.
Leahy: He will. But that was him on MSNBC with Morning Joe.
Carmichael: Well no difference. I think that’s really interesting because his quote was from yesterday before the debate.
Leahy: Yes.
Carmichael: So that’s how close it was to the actual event which. and so what he said turned out to be literally, I mean, there’s nothing that he said that turned out to be correct.
Leahy: It was all entirely wrong.
Carmichael: Yeah, and so CNN and MSNBC both predicted the same thing as Meacham. And they all got it wrong, and I think you were talking about Frank Luntz’s group afterwards, and they said that Trump won seven to one.
Leahy: Yeah, and the one just said it was a draw.
Listen to the full second hour here:
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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 Jon Meacham by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
