impeachment inquiry, the evidence may be tilting in the democrats favor but the calendar is arguably not. it s already november. 2020 is fast approaching. we ve had a parade of private depositions but we are seemingly still weeks away from public hearings. speaker pelosi told bloom berg news today she assumes public hearings will begin this month but we are likely at least a month away from a key court ruling which could determine if other high profile witnesses, say like john bolton, will be compelled to testify or not. and after the public hearings are done, a senate trial could take weeks. meaning democrats are going to have to start convincing the public that somehow congress is in a better positions are and te going to have that make that case in an election year. and that could be a tall task. perhaps even taller by the fact that some democrats like pete buttigieg are arguing that maybe it s best for them if voters decide, not congress. here s what buttigieg told the
buy-in. they don t and yet they feel like they have no choice but to do this. what do they do next? i think the speaker foresaw this because she was looking at the mueller report, the denseness of it, all the things that we know. ukraine changed all of that for democrats because here you had basically an open court, the president of the united states by his own words, both on camera and in a sort of transcript, and that really didn t leave democrats a choice. now, given that, i think it s been important for speaker pelosi to take control of the process and to say, here s we re going to have a hearing process that really will enable us to tell the story. and this is a much simpler story. it s about cheating. it s about fairness. and it s not about the last election. it s about this election. i think the democrats still have
era. this is not necessarily something that they want to be talking about going into 2020. they want to be talking about more of a record of legislative accomplishment. but it s also unavoidable in part because of the nature of the theoretically impeachable offense we are talking about here, right? this is a president who democrats believe was using his power to make sure he wins the next election. so it s not as though you can say we re going to just let the voters decide this. the whole point of what democrats think is impeachable about this is they think the president was trying to let people in other countries decide this. so you cannot divorce the electoral politics from it and it is a yet unsolved riddle for the democrats running for re-election next year. in some ways, though, garrett, and you re not alone in noting that part of this is about the idea that he may have been essentially trying to cheat to win, right? which is what makes this urgent. they haven t made that case
president and you re unsuccessful doesn t mean you re not talented. i even look back at john huntsman. the 2012 cycle. boy, he looked great on paper. david pluff was scared of john huntsman. didn t work out because that s where republicans are. democratic voters aren t where beto o rourke is but there was rational in him running. on the younger side, particularly when there was so many people who are older. has a family who s cute. who ended up running in a race where he proved, hey, if i can actually run this same race in iowa and the industrial midwest i did in texas, democrats can actually win. so there was a rationale. it just proved that democratic voters weren t buying the product. and i mean that s just what we end up so seeing almost every cycle. i got two words. pete buttigieg. like that was his problem. buttigieg grabbed that early buzz that you could have argued you would have thought beto would have grabbed. well, i think here s the thing with the field where you ve got
communication strategy. and they really didn t. in fact, when you end up having robert mueller testify on capitol hill a couple months after that report had actually come out, there really wasn t a whole lot of urgency. if democrats actually want to win and capitalize on this, they re actually going to need to take the narrative in their hands and make a case to the american public and not rely on the media for all the kind of scoops and great reporting that s actually come about from this. one other really important point is how much we ve actually learned in totality in just the five weeks of this impeachment inquiry. to me, it s actually stunning you know, i ve been a washington reporter going back to lewinsky. how much we have learned about this just in five weeks to me is striking. now, it s going to be up to democrats to tell the story they want to tell in a way they think s going to score points for them. donna, you know this leadership well. speaker pelosi foresaw this. it