Molly Ball joined the Federalist Radio Hour today to discuss news from Europe, the President’s strategy against ISIS, and her work on Bill de Blasio’s fight against inequality.
Ball, a staff writer at the Atlantic who covers politics, said she thinks the outsider candidates like Carson and Trump bolster the case that extreme times call for extreme measures. “You have these outsider candidates proposing outsider solutions to the problem that may be viscerally appealing to the people who elevated them in the first place because they wanted something that felt more extreme,” she said.
Ball said her piece based on Bill de Blasio and the Left grew out of her fatigue in covering the Republican civil war. “I wanted to take a look at the future of the Left and the issues dividing the Democratic party,” she said.
According to Ball, de Blasio’s term as mayor so far has been ironic. “You can make a strong case that he is waging a multi-front war on income inequality, at the same time, where he’s fallen down is on the politics…on the ability to respond to public opinion,” she said.
Later in the hour we are joined by John Schindler, national security columnist at the Observer, to discuss Obama’s press conference about ISIS and the recent calls to close U.S. borders to Syrian refugees.
Schindler said that it’s easy for world leaders to say the wrong thing, but Obama’s ability to say so many wrong things in a single press conference is a work of art.
“The Obama administration has been search for a strategy on Syria and I’ve strongly criticized the lack of any strategy,” he said. “That said, I’d rather the White House have no strategy toward Syria and ISIS than have him adopt Putin’s strategy, which is deeply at odds with Western interests.”
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