Monday on the RealClearPolitics podcast, Tom Bevan, Andrew Walworth, and Carl Cannon discuss the latest polls on the war with Iran and the outlook for the country’s new supreme leader. And then Jeff Gedmin, the CEO of USAID’s Middle East Broadcasting Networks, joins the show to talk about the future of American global public media, and the panel debates whether to hold NYC Mayor Mamdani accountable for his wife’s social media posts about Israel. You can listen to the show live, weekdays at 11:00 a.m. on SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly Channel 111, and then on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and here on our website. *** The show opens with the latest polls showing how Americans feel about the war with Iran and the news that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s 56-year-old son, Mojtaba, is expected to succeed him. “About one in five voters are undecided. They’re taking sort of a wait-and-see approach, including, by the way, 15 or 20% of Republicans,” Tom Bevan reported. “But if it drags on, and it starts affecting prices here at home-continues to affect prices here at home-he’s going to pay a political price for that.” Carl Cannon added about the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei: “When the first ayatollah came in in 1979, one of his selling points-it was a big thing-was that he didn’t believe in dynastic succession. So now, 47 years in, Ayatollah Khamenei’s son is sort of given the thing. It’s back to the old-out with the old, in with the old.” *** And then at minute 10, the panel turns to Sen. Lindsey Graham’s “wargasm” Sunday on FOX News, declaring that the U.S. is “marching through the world, cleaning out the bad guys,” starting in Iran and then Cuba. “This has nothing to do with Ronald Reagan. It’s George W. Bush on steroids and acid,” Carl Cannon said. “What is he doing? Does he think this is actually helpful?” Tom Bevan added. “Lindsey Graham is even making regular neoconservatives blush with his enthusiasm. He is Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove riding the bomb-yee-haw. It’s crazy.” *** At minute 16, a quick aside about Trump offering asylum to the Iranian women’s soccer team, currently stranded in Australia. “This is an interesting move on Trump’s part, and I think it would also probably be a public-relations coup for Donald Trump,” Bevan said. *** Plus, at minute 18, Jeff Gedmin, CEO of the U.S.-funded Middle East Broadcasting Networks, reacts to a judge’s ruling that Kari Lake never had the authority to shut down the US’s foreign broadcasting systems, and the role they could play in reaching Iranian audiences. “The information-warfare space-ideas matter a lot,” he said. “What we invest as the United States is pretty small compared to the Chinese, the Russians, and non-state terror actors.” “Kari Lake has been restoring the parts of Voice of America, including VOA Persian, so I suspect this way or that, in light of this ruling, that will continue, and the hiring back or hiring forward will be more robust,” Gedmin predicted. “I think VOA, in some fashion, will continue to come back. I don’t know if it’s slowly or robustly, but I think now we’re at the beginning of a debate about what’s needed and the role of State Department public diplomacy versus these networks.” *** At minute 35, the group looks at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife being criticized for liking 70 tweets that took what The Free Press called extreme positions against Israel, and whether the mayor should be held accountable for his wife’s social media activity. “I think if a Republican mayor’s wife had tweeted 70 times something derogatory about Black people, the media would be very interested in her private life and would make that Republican mayor account for it,” Tom Bevan commented. “The natural thing is to defend your wife, but the lesson here is not that if you’re the spouse of a publicly elected official, you can have no opinions whatsoever.” *** Finally, the panel looks at Republican midterm strategy as Trump prepares to meet with GOP lawmakers in Florida. “They have to have a unified, coherent message that addresses issues that people care about: the economy, inflation. And it’s hard to do that when gas prices are now going up because we have a war going on in the Middle East, overshadowing everything,” Bevan said. “It gives the Democrats a really easy target-it’s like shooting fish in a barrel from a messaging standpoint, certainly in terms of riling up their base, which is what this election is going to be all about.” *** Don’t miss a single episode of the RealClearPolitics weeknight radio show – subscribe at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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