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CNN's The Arena with Kasie Hunt
Abdul El-Sayed Clinches Michigan Primary In Key Win For Progressives; GOP Senator Says No One Or Nothing Can Rein In Trump; Flock Cameras Spark Privacy Debate Across The Country; August 1981: MTV Hits The T.V. Airwaves; The Surprise Star At A Phillies Games. Aired 12-1p ET
Aired August 08, 2026 - 12:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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SPIKE LEE, OSCAR-WINNING FILMMAKER: You know what? My friends call me "Negrodamus."
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BIANNA GOLODRYGA, CNN ANCHOR: We'll have to keep an eye on what he prophesizes next.
All right. That's all we have time for. Don't forget, you can find all of our shows online at podcast on CNN.com/audio, and on all other major platforms.
I'm Bianna Golodryga in New York.
Thanks so much for watching. Christiane will be back next week.
KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: Hi, everyone. I'm Kasie Hunt. Welcome to THE ARENA SATURDAY.
The race is on in Michigan, and it's likely to be one of the year's most expensive and most brutal. This week, progressive Abdul El-Sayed narrowly clinched Michigan's Democratic Senate nomination. He now faces off against Republican former congressman Mike Rogers. Rogers already out with an ad trying to appeal to dissatisfied Democrats. But it's a relatively tame opening to a general election fight that sounds like it could get seriously ugly.
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MIKE ROGERS (R), MICHIGAN SENATE CANDIDATE: If you're among the majority of Democratic voters that woke up on Wednesday feeling, well, hopeless because the person who won does not represent your values? Well, just know there is still hope.
ABDUL EL-SAYED (D), MICHIGAN SENATE CANDIDATE: We want all Democrats to be a part of the movement that we need to take on to address Donald Trump.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Abdul El-Sayed. Lovely gentleman. He's a man of hate.
J.D. VANCE, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: God forbid you're going to have President El-Sayed in three years.
EL-SAYED: There are people like J.D. Vance or Donald Trump or Mike Rogers, who wanted to define America as being too small to include some kinds of people.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. The most radical Senate candidate in America.
EL-SAYED: I'm pretty damn dangerous.
Listen, man, if you can't say the name Abdulrahman, keep the name out your damn mouth.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.
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HUNT: OK. My panel is here in THE ARENA. CNN legal analyst, former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams, Capitol Hill correspondent at Puck News, Marianna Sotomayor, CNN political commentator Paul Begala, and Republican strategist and former RNC communications director Doug Heye.
Welcome to all of you. Thank you so much for being here on an August Saturday.
Paul Begala, you have made many ads. You have seen many more ads, and you already are getting a taste of what this is going to look like. I mean, the candidates are trying to currently appeal as blandly as possible to as many people as possible. But the ad war and the outside voices are going to be incredibly nasty.
PAUL BEGALA, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Yes. Abdul won a narrow victory and more problematic for him he has a narrow coalition. The socialists all say -- I'm a moderate. I don't like the socialist. I can't stand them.
HUNT: I appreciate your candor. That's great.
BEGALA: But they always say, the socialists, that they care about the working class and about black folk. I can tell you, black folk and the working class don't like the socialists. Abdul has got a lot of work to do. I talked this week, actually, to one very impressive Democratic black leader in Michigan. They hadn't even been contacted by Abdul yet. Like, what are you doing? By the way, I talked to a Republican strategist who said, he promised me that they're going to make Hasan Piker as famous as Donald Trump in that state.
Hasan Piker is a controversial commentator. He's never even run a campaign for sheriff. I don't know what he's doing there. He doesn't live in Michigan. I don't understand it all why Abdul is palling around with him. Because this is the guy who said we deserved it on 9/11, who said I don't care about rapes of women by Hamas terrorists. He said terrible things. So the Republicans are going to use relationship to attack Abdul, and it's going to be very nasty and very vicious.
HUNT: Can I dig in a little bit on? Because I'm from Michigan. Full disclosure, originally. And so I'm familiar with the state in a way that perhaps I'm not as familiar with some other places. And when I talk to folks that I know from there, the antipathy between some of the communities that vote Democratic, right? There are the traditional African-American bastions in the city of Detroit. And then there's obviously, you know, the population is predominantly Muslim in the Dearborn area, it's right nearby. But there is not a lot of love lost.
Can you help us understand kind of why that is and what impact that might have on his attempt to win this seat?
BEGALA: Well, I think a lot of it is this socialist message which tends to talk at people rather than with them.
HUNT: And what is it about socialism specifically that black voters don't like?
BEGALA: You got to ask them. When AOC beat Joe Crowley, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, a Democratic congressman, said to me, I don't know about New York. This is a southern congressman. He said, I don't know about New York, but black folk don't want no damn socialism. And we have seen that over all of those years since AOC won her very impressive primary victory over Joe Crowley.
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We've seen that. There's a deep resistance. And I don't want to speak for the black community, but it's real. And Abdul has got his work cut out for him. He's a very talented politician, but he needs to put together the old black and blue coalition that wins Michigan. Black folk and blue-collar workers.
ELLIOT WILLIAMS, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: I don't think it's socialism at all. I think it's the fact that his name is Abdul El-Sayed. I mean, that is what it comes down to. I think it's a little bit of a fiction that minority communities necessarily are going to stand in lockstep with each other. Look, you see it, black folks and Cubans in Miami, which are two ethnic groups that have been at odds since basically since the 1980s. And I think you'll see that again here.
Its -- I don't know if it gets as deep as socialism. I think it's the same stuff as to why, whether it was Donald Trump or that ad, or using his middle name over and over again to remind people who he is, I think that resonates.
BEGALA: I think that's part of it. And that's despicable. But if you look at Miss Chevalier in New York, who does -- she's not -- she does not have an Arab name. She did terrible in the black community. She won, but she won whites two to one. By the way, she calls us, I'm white. I don't know if you can see if you've got color. She calls --
WILLIAMS: You identify as a white person.
BEGALA: Miss Chevalier calls us colonizers. She won the colonizers two to one. That's why she's the nominee. It's a very elitist movement that pretends to be of the people. And he's got to broaden out and actually get folks in Michigan who bend metal, right, who work, who are in Detroit. He's got to do a lot to broaden that coalition.
HUNT: Yes. I mean, I think when you dig into the counties where if you look at where Haley Stevens won, for example, in Detroit, in Wayne County, which is the big county there, the electorate that backed her was people of color, black Americans, as well as people without college degrees. If you looked at Ann Arbor, right, it was the reverse. And they voted for El-Sayed.
I mean, Doug Heye, the president, of course, is taking, you know, forget socialism. He's blowing right through that and saying, actually, all these guys are communists. I think you got a little bit of projecting there from J.D. Vance promoting a not-yet-first-term senator straight to the presidency, a trajectory that I think he himself, you know, basically would like to follow perhaps in the long run.
But what do you see? I mean, do you think that Mike Rogers, given the political environment, right, I mean, the president's approval ratings are absolutely horrible, like the worst they've ever been, can Mike Rogers possibly overcome that? Because he hasn't in previous elections. He has not risen above the top of the ticket.
DOUG HEYE, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: I think the primary tells us that it's possible. It's still a difficult race, and it was going to be regardless of who won the Democratic primary. But here's we'll know who wins. Obviously, the results will tell us. But if you can tell me, is this election going to be about El-Sayed or Donald Trump? If I know who the election is ultimately going to be about and what voters who they're thinking about when they go in, then I know who wins that election.
And one of the things that these socialist candidates have done really well is capture the youth vote. Their problem is, the older you get, the more they lose that vote. What is the most reliable voter in the country? Older black women. So how does El-Sayed get those voters who already don't like him? He's got a challenge. They both have challenges. This is a very tough race.
MARIANNA SOTOMAYOR, CAPITOL HILL CORRESPONDENT, PUCK NEWS: The El- Sayed campaign is legitimately, at this time, having those conversations. How and who do we bring in to go and talk to these key constituencies? And look, there's obviously a lot of the coalescing already happening, a lot of endorsements from Democratic senators, everyone saying, OK, let's get along. But that is always way easier literally said than done.
What a lot of, especially state Democrats in Michigan, what they are waiting for is for El-Sayed and his campaign to call them, to go into those communities, because he himself can try and rally all of those people. But everyone that I've talked to says you need actual trusted voices that these communities talk to all the time to go in and sell him. And even then, not a guarantee that based on his record and who he has associated himself which the campaign has said, look, if people support us, we can't do anything about the type of support --
HUNT: Well, he invited him in.
SOTOMAYOR: Exactly. Like we can't do anything about that. It doesn't seem like they're going to distance themselves and maybe there's going to be political pressure that comes in.
HEYE: And El-Sayed should look at some of this as an opportunity. There is nothing that a county chair or a community leader likes more than the candidate or the campaign manager saying, we need your help.
HUNT: Yes. All right. Coming up next here in THE ARENA, what one Republican senator said this week about President Trump and why he said it. It's our "Quote of the Week."
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SEN. JOHN CORNYN (R-TX): Well, there's nothing we could do to rein in the president.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What have you learned about not just the exercise of power, but the limits on your power as a result of the conflict?
TRUMP: There are no limits.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No limits.
TRUMP: No, not -- I haven't learned that lesson yet. I know there are. But, you know, there are no limits.
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HUNT: That's President Trump saying last month there are no limits to his power, at least when it comes to the war with Iran. Earlier this summer, I guess, when he said that. But a year and a half into the president's second term, some lawmakers and critics are asking, does the president have limits to his power when it comes to, well, anything?
This week, two Republican senators, Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, voted to advance Todd Blanche's attorney general nomination in the Judiciary Committee. That was after Blanche put down on paper some language around the president's controversial Anti-Weaponization Fund and the IRS immunity agreement.
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And after that, the outgoing Texas Republican gave this assessment of the commander-in-chief. It's our "Quote of the Week."
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CORNYN: Well, there's nothing we could do to rein in the president when he said he likes the fund and he wishes still exists. But the fact of the matter is it's dead. And that's all we could do under these circumstances.
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HUNT: "That's all we could do under these circumstances." I mean, Doug Heye, it's almost like it should be the gift for the second Trump term and the first for all Republicans ever. You know? It's the best circumstances. We can't -- we can't do anything.
HEYE: You know, I stopped counting at about 5,000 the number of times reporters would ask me, when is the moment when Republicans are going to stand up to Donald Trump? It's never going to happen. And I made a bet with a friend who worked for one of what we call the YOLO caucus, which never existed and is a term we should retire, that all three of them, Thom Tillis, John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy, would vote in favor of Todd Blanche. No surprise.
And the only thing about it that does surprise me is these are all older men. They have good pensions, in some cases, multiple pensions. And if they want to lobby after they leave the Senate, they go through a two-year lobbying ban. That expires when Donald Trump has three weeks left in his presidency. What's the problem? And meanwhile, I'm going to have a really big steak, and I'm going to charge a very expensive red burgundy that I'm going to have. That's my YOLO.
BEGALA: You know, I wish we had a constitution that empowered a separate and co-equal branch of government to check and balance our president when he's out of control.
HUNT: Wait, wait. Wait.
BEGALA: Oh, wait, we do.
WILLIAMS: Do we? I mean, actually --
BEGALA: You know?
WILLIAMS: You know, it's funny. No, you know, I -- I wish we had a constitution that actually had a first branch of government that was identified first in the Constitution. It's not just --
HUNT: Would it be -- is it called Article One, what that would be called?
WILLIAMS: And not even co-equal, a first among equals, if it could only step in and put a check on the second branch, God, wouldn't that --
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BEGALA: Let me let me give some historical examples. Congress controls the purse. It's most important power Congress has. In the '70s, conservatives got together and they didn't want any taxpayer money funding abortions. So they passed the Hyde Amendment. 50 years later, it's still a law. In the '80s, liberals didn't want President Reagan to help the contras in Central America. They passed the Boland Amendment. The Reagan administration sold weapons and got around because they couldn't spend taxpayer money to help the contras that Reagan wanted to.
HUNT: Right.
BEGALA: That caused a scandal, but that Congress could do this. It's not this stupid pinky promise that Todd Blanche. Oh, I really promise the -- pass a law, guys. Pass a law. Say, you may not spend our money on this, on reimbursing these thugs who beat cops on January 6th.
WILLIAMS: OK, number one, pass a law. That's Congress's -- one of their main functions other than funding the government. They chose not to do that.
BEGALA: Right.
WILLIAMS: And also hold nominees accountable. They don't have to confirm every one of the president's nominees. And I'll be the first to tell you that, of course, the president is entitled to his people. But when there are serious strikes against a nominee, Congress has -- the Senate has every right to vote them down. It happens to presidents of both parties. And quite frankly, it probably should have happened here, starting with his personal proximity to the president, his former attorney. That is just not what we ought to have as an attorney general of the United States.
SOTOMAYOR: Confirming nominees has been so predictable on Capitol Hill. I mean, like, as a reporter, you just know how these chips are going to fall. For a brief second in time when Cornyn and Tillis really were negotiating, I think there was a moment where you said, OK, maybe Blanche doesn't get confirmed, but he could also still stay because now there's precedent as acting attorney general.
So there was always the -- there was never a question that he wouldn't be where he is going to be. However, it's just, again, gotten so predictable. And you see all of the same senatorial players, let's put it that way, who are going to vote no. And then there's a little bit of flirting by Bill Cassidy saying, oh, I don't know how I'm going to vote yet. Tune in by this time and you'll find out. There's a little bit of showmanship that at the end of the day, we all knew, given how these senators tend to vote, which way they will go. I mean, at this point, any nomination.
HUNT: Yes. And by the end of the week, Cassidy announced, I'm going to do it. I'm in. HEYE: Kasie, you mentioned the Constitution, when you and I were in
the Capitol every day, we would see Republican members reaching their pocket and say, here's my Constitution.
HUNT: Ted Cruz had one.
HEYE: When's the last time you saw that?
SOTOMAYOR: Haven't seen it in a long time. I see deficit budgets. That's what I see. Little pins of that.
HUNT: My guess is some of them still have it. But I will say there was this moment on the Hill this week that stuck out because Josh Hawley was asked if he had seen John Cornyn's comments. So Hawley, the conservative Republican senator from Missouri, was asked about, oh, did you see that John Cornyn said there's nothing to do to rein the president in? Even Hawley seemed really confused by that. Watch.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Do you agree with Senator Cornyn that there's nothing that can be done at this point to constrain Trump?
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SEN. JOSH HAWLEY (R-MO): Who said that?
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Senator Cornyn told CNN yesterday.
HAWLEY: He said that even after voting for Todd Blanche?
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Yes.
HAWLEY: I don't know. I haven't seen it. That doesn't --
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Yes.
HAWLEY: I don't know the answer to that.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: OK.
HAWLEY: What -- to what he said. So I better look at what he said.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK, one more question?
HAWLEY: (INAUDIBLE).
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: A tech question?
HAWLEY: I'll be back.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: OK.
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HUNT: Paul, what was that? BEGALA: Oh, he doesn't want -- you know, he has to work with John
Cornyn for the next couple of months. I actually give him a pass on that because Cornyn is a good guy. He's just a human being. I think what he's done was a profile in cowardice, and I don't think Hawley wants to insult his colleagues.
HUNT: Yes. So let's watch what Trump, who again, let's like circle back to our previous conversation about the midterm elections and where Trump's approval rating is. OK. He talked to Punchbowl News, the president did, and he basically said, it's not about me. It's about them. Watch.
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TRUMP: If I don't run, will those people go out and vote? And that's the one thing I can't tell. I'm going to ask them to, because a lot of them are very angry at Republicans, to be honest with you. I don't know. I mean, they're angry at Republicans, but they're not angry with me.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: That's an interesting thing. Why, though?
TRUMP: They're not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans.
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HUNT: Are they angry at him?
HEYE: There's truth -- well, I think voters are mad at everybody. It's part of why we've seen these insertions over the past several years of the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, now, the DSA, the Democrats' own Freedom Caucus at this level. So on one level, what he's saying is true. But you look at his approval ratings, they're pretty mad at Donald Trump as well. But his main point is I do better on the ballot than other Republicans. He's right.
HUNT: Yes. For sure. There are a lot of people who honestly didn't vote at all who voted for Donald Trump.
All right. Coming up next here in THE ARENA, they're watching you. Ahead, the growing bipartisan pushback to surveillance cameras that are popping up in communities across the country.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The camera is seeing the back of a piece of cardboard. And every now and then, I'll flip it around and they can read my sign.
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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I would like to ask for an immediate removal of the cameras and for the contracts to be canceled as soon as possible.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You have no right to follow us, to document every single move we make in this town, nor anywhere in this country.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It really is just a naked violation of privacy.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm once again here to request all funding for Flock Safety ceased.
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HUNT: At city halls across the country, people are speaking out against what law enforcement calls a new crime fighting tool. They're called Flock cameras, and they record and analyze cars and license plates. There are more than 120,000 of these cameras across the U.S., and they are all connected, meaning that there's a sprawling nationwide network of recorded activity available to any law enforcement agency that opts in.
Flock denies that their cameras are used to track people. But in recent weeks, we have seen headlines of police officers reportedly abusing the Flock network to track and stalk women without their knowledge. Several cities across the country have canceled their contracts with Flock after privacy concerns from residents and in some instances, the vandalism of these cameras. But police officers across the country say they're key to keeping communities safe.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have found people who are driving around in a dementia state. We have solved crimes where people have been killed in the street and the vehicle fled, and only, and I mean only because of Flock.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Some of the concerns I think are outweighed by the incredible benefits to our community.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They're very obvious. We're not trying to hide them. They're just there in order to help with our investigative leads.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's about providing our professional police officers the most current technology available.
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HUNT: Elliot Williams.
WILLIAMS: Yes.
HUNT: Remarkable situation. I honestly hadn't been paying attention to it. Now you start looking for them. You see them everywhere.
WILLIAMS: Yes. I think a few things are happening here. I think, one, privacy concerns. No, no political party. There's the libertarian right and sort of the skeptical privacy left that comes together on privacy issues that are just troubled by stuff like this, number one. And number two, I think it's just --
HUNT: The Ron Wyden and Rand Paul.
WILLIAMS: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And it's the Josh Hawley and, you know, pick your lefty Democrat who doesn't like --
BEGALA: Amy Klobuchar.
WILLIAMS: Amy Klobuchar, OK. And then on top of that, I think it's a broader backlash to tech generally. I think it's A.I., it's tech. The public is just concerned with where the world is going and things like cameras showing up in their neighborhoods is making a lot of people nervous.
HEYE: I had to put a memo together a couple of weeks ago for a client, and I said, keep paying attention to the issue. I keep bringing it up and I'm sorry, but data centers, data centers, data centers. We can now say that about Flock cameras as well. And the horse shoe politics that you mentioned apply on both of these. You know, it was just last week that Willie Nelson and Governor Abbott, two of Paul's personal heroes, agree on putting a moratorium on data centers. And this is the same issue. And it is that distrust of tech and the tech titans that really bring that.
WILLIAMS: And I'll add one more small one to it. Doesn't fit as perfectly, but it's also backlash to ICE has cropped up because of some of the surveillance techniques they've used that even sort of Republicans or conservatives who were on board with President Trump's immigration agenda. The license plate scanning, it makes many, many people uncomfortable. And all of it is just this jumble of privacy issues that are growing in the country that make people really uneasy.
BEGALA: Politicians are smart and they learn. And this is a -- the clip you just showed makes me so proud to be an American. These are grassroots Americans standing up and saying, none of your damn business. Back off.
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WILLIAMS: And it was also just -- I just note that there was a guy in a Marine Semper Fi shirt. There was a black dude in whatever he was wearing. It was just a mix of Americans sort of across what appeared to be certainly geography, but also something economic.
BEGALA: Somebody's going to put this all together. Actually, a couple of somebody. Somebody in the Republican Party, somebody in the Democratic Party is going to put together the surveillance state, surveillance capitalism, so that, you know, Apple is tracking you wherever you go, with the opposite of the data centers, with social media. Rahm Emanuel has proposed a ban on social media for kids under 16 and A.I.
There's going to be a big movement against big tech in each party. Somebody is going to run for president on this. And I think that's good for the system. That's what we need because they're going to listen. You know, politicians are like, there are my people. They're going over there. I must hurry and lead them.
MARIANNA SOTOMAYOR, CAPITOL HILL CORRESPONDENT, PUCK NEWS: The question is, which we have always had these generational discussions, especially with technology, is Congress is so allergic to regulations. And as much as there's pushes and as much as there's discussions and you absolutely see the horseshoe when it comes to conversations about surveillance of other types, like that has been happening. Will they actually come together and put limitations? Big question.
HEYE: And no good ideas start in Washington. So state governments are going to be very important here, what they do and what they don't do.
WILLIAMS: Yes. And the wild thing, and back to your point, Marianna, the wild thing about a generational fight is that it's Gen Z that is in many regards driving a lot of the skepticism, certainly on these privacy issues and a lot of the concerns about big tech. It's just they are uncomfortable far in a different way than many other past generations when they were young were skeptical of technologies as they were growing.
HUNT: Yes, you know, it's interesting. So there -- A.I., we're talking about flat cameras. It's also now in baby monitors, right? So it's called the Nanit. Full disclosure, when I had kids, I looked at this and I said, absolutely F not, am I doing this? Sorry. But it's your choice because here's what it does, OK? So this is a woman writing about her baby's Nanit camera. So it's a camera that sits above your crib like any baby monitor.
But she says this, when I put the Nanit app on my mom's phone for an evening of babysitting, she was bewildered by the phone notifications and mystified by why I would even want the analytics. And she plainly doesn't like it when I use the app to check a little compulsively if my sleeping kids are in fact sleeping. In her view, it's all anxiety inducing. She was weirded out by the idea that my kids' data would be live on a server and that they would perhaps be able to retrieve it someday. Too much, she said.
Now, maybe I'm just an old soul, but I mean, Elliot, I got to tell you, like, I went to great lengths to try to avoid the kinds of technology that would track, you know, would put pictures of my kids in the cloud, OK?
WILLIAMS: Yes.
HUNT: And it was something I had to do actively. It remains something that I have to do actively and it's getting harder, it's not getting easier.
WILLIAMS: Paul talked about your iPhone tracking you everywhere and you really do have to opt in to opt out of all the things that are the defaults. The big thing in that quote you had there was the idea of the information being on a server. And yes, the companies can say, no, we're not going to do anything with it. Oh, we're going to destroy it. But the public simply doesn't believe that anymore.
And again, I don't want to turn this back to A.I. repeatedly, but it's sort of a similar thing. People are concerned about when I put information somewhere and I'm told it's going to be destroyed, is it being used for research or testing or whatever else? And it's a real concern. And that's, you know, in the context of these videos and so on, it's just something that makes people really, really uneasy. You just don't know what happens to it. You don't see that information after it's logged onto that server.
BEGALA: And having helped my wife raise four kids, it doesn't make you a better parent. It makes you a worse parent. Kids need to learn resilience. The first time, here's like pro tip. The first time my eldest son slept through the night was the first time I forgot to turn the baby monitor on. And guess what? He grew up fine. This helicoptering is bad now.
It's going to be worse with technology and it's going to raise a bunch of kids who, you know, I was just telling my kids, be a pillow, not a balloon. If I poke a balloon with a pin, it shatters. It's gone. It's not a pillow. It's not a balloon anymore. If I poke a pillow, yes, it's still a pillow. And they develop that resiliency by being left alone, by not being monitored every minute. Go out and play. I mean, I just say --
HUNT: And Jonathan Haidt --
BEGALA: I love Jonathan Haidt. Everybody should read Jonathan Haidt's book. He's a professor at NYU. He wrote a book called "The Anxious Generation." He's just terrific.
HUNT: No, I mean, as a parent of small children, I am very much, you know, we have the tin can phone. That's, you know, like the analog person-to-person tech. I mean, I guess it's tech, really, but it's got the curly, cute cord that I remember from my childhood. And teaching them phone etiquette is hilarious because they don't -- they've never seen it. They don't understand it. I'm having so much fun, and he's planning his own play dates on the phone. And he's like, Mommy, what are we doing on Friday? I'm like, well, you have this. He's like, oh, I have practice. Sorry, I can't. I'm like, OK, dude.
[12:35:04]
All right, anyway, ahead in The Arena, ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll. How those six words forever changed television as we know it.
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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have made it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll.
(END VIDEO CLIP) HUNT: And with that, television changed forever. We are well into the summer of 2026. But if you were flipping channels this time in 1981, you might have noticed a new one called music television. You, of course, know it as MTV. The first song played. Pretty obvious.
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(MUSIC)
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HUNT: Do you know every word to that song? Because I sure do. It is hard to overstate just how much of an impact MTV's had and does have on American culture. And impact MTV one area in particular, politics. As part of the 1992 presidential race, MTV started its choose or lose campaign. President George H.W. Bush, Texas billionaire Ross Perot, and Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, remember he was that too, they were all invited to participate in a town hall with young Americans. One candidate accepted. Some of the questions were blunt. Some were funny. Some were about issues the country still faces today.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If you had to do it over again, would you inhale?
BILL CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Sure, if I could. I tried before.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Governor Clinton, who did you believe, Clarence Thomas or Anita Hill?
CLINTON: Anita Hill.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How long would it take you to balance the budget and get us running in black?
CLINTON: I don't know the answer to that. I think it would be difficult to do in four years because we have quadrupled the debt in 12 years. But I'll tell you this, it'll go down every year when I'm there, not up.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: Oh, wow. Paul Begala, you were there.
BEGALA: I was there.
HUNT: For all of this. Were you actually there at that event?
BEGALA: Oh, yes. I was there.
HUNT: OK. I mean, that's amazing. Fascinating.
BEGALA: He's a pretty talented politician. HUNT: Yes.
BEGALA: So he didn't need a lot of coaching. I was just kind of along for the ride. But there was the famous question that one kid asked him. What kind of underwear do you wear?
HUNT: OK. Well, so this was in 1994. So what we just showed was from 1992. Let's show everybody the 1994 one. So it's now unclear whether Paul Begala was in. Were you in the room in 1992?
BEGALA: Oh, yes. I went everywhere.
HUNT: OK, fine. Let's watch the moment that Paul Begala is talking about. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mr. President, the world's dying to know, is it boxers or briefs?
CLINTON: Usually briefs. I can't believe she did that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: Yes?
BEGALA: Oh, he caught more guff for that.
HUNT: Sign of things to come? Sorry.
WILLIAMS: Yes.
BEGALA: Of course, you know, if you asked Trump today, he would say, depends, you know, on his move.
HUNT: Wah, wah. But seriously, talk about the reason that Bill Clinton decided to do that in 1992, right? I mean, he was a long shot, right? He was the comeback kid in the primary. He was this, you know, young guy. The Democrats, you know, were kind of all over the place in who they were going to pick. You know, he was an incumbent president. It's always hard to beat an incumbent.
And he's the only one that says yes to this upstart network, right, that no probably, you know, serious. I mean, you know, panels like this probably didn't take MTV very seriously, but he did.
BEGALA: Yes, because he saw what's now obvious and common, that pop culture and politics were merging. And he helped accelerate that merger. He was a pop cultural icon. He went on Arsenio Hall. And he did that because his wife had seen Arsenio during the L.A. riots, and he was magnificent. Arsenio was not being a comedian that night. He was being a community leader. He was wonderful. So Hillary was very impressed. She called her husband. We go on there. I gave him my sunglasses, and he played the saxophone.
HEYE: Those were your sunglasses? BEGALA: Those were my sunglasses.
HEYE: I was watching that live.
BEGALA: Oh, those were my wayfarers.
HUNT: That is a mic drop.
BEGALA: But he got the pieces all coming together. And now we have a reality star as our president.
WILLIAMS: Yes, well, and a reality star from MTV as the secretary of transportation.
BEGALA: Oh, that's right.
WILLIAMS: But I think, you know, broadly speaking, it's funny. All of the biggest moments we can think of from MTV have nothing to do with music. And this is what a cultural force it became that, you know, to your point, Bill Clinton recognized where the culture was going. Bill Clinton walked so AOC could run. Folks who kind of mastered whatever the new tech or the new media was at the time seemed to be the ones who could run.
HEYE: And to your point, in college, watching the real world was a much bigger deal than watching videos, even though I very specifically remember the first time seeing the video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit," the first time I heard it and said, this is different. I didn't love it, but it was different.
HUNT: The video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit," I mean, that is like an iconic, that's an iconic piece of cultural history. Marianna, did you grow up watching MTV?
SOTOMAYOR: Yes, I did.
HUNT: Did you miss it entirely?
SOTOMAYOR: No, I didn't. No, no, no. Literally, I would go home. First thing I would do, walk in, turn on the T.V., because TRL was on. I had missed the first 30 minutes, but then I could see, like, what the new music videos were, and I would, like, eat my snacks, and then I'd do my homework.
[12:45:07]
But I actually kind of -- I did miss this whole, like, political era moment. I wish we had that. Like, maybe I'm just a nerd, but seeing pop culture and politics is kind of my bread and butter when I was a kid growing up. That's kind of why I'm here. So even just seeing those flashback moments, I mean, I wish I could have that impact again. And it does. It's just different, right?
WILLIAMS: I can't overstate how much, you know, so MTV was all music videos for the first several years, but everything from "Choose or Lose" to "The Real World," you know, the first sort of big mainstream reality show where you saw lots of different types of young people, to "Sex in the 90s." They did a whole series about sexuality and HIV and all kinds of things in the 1990s, and they just kept pumping this content out and became a political force, I think perhaps even far more than a musical one.
HUNT: Yes, I mean, and those decisions, too, around that, I mean, they really were willing to step out there and show life with HIV at a time when there was a significant stigma, and it was brave in a lot of ways.
WILLIAMS: Yes, the big one you're talking about there is Pedro Zamora in 1994, the third season of "The Real World." He's this handsome, telegenic young man, but you find out in the first episode he's living with AIDS. And you watch this very sympathetic figure wither and die on national television. It was so brutal and painful to watch. And remember, this is coming out of a period when President Reagan didn't even say the word AIDS for the first, I think, five years of his presidency and didn't do an event on it until 1987.
It was just stigma, and certainly around LGBT people as well, that we just can't comprehend today. It's hard to forget, hard to remember what the 1990s were like, certainly around HIV, but just around all of these issues generally, and MTV really pushed the envelope on all of them.
HEYE: And one of Pedro's castmates is now a host on "Fox."
WILLIAMS: Yes.
BEGALA: Right.
HUNT: Wait, which? Now he's the Secretary of Transportation.
HEYE: Yes. But his wife was also a host on "Fox."
WILLIAMS: Oh, no, no, no. She was Boston with Sean Duffy, Rachel Campos. They were together on that.
HEYE: No, she was San Francisco.
WILLIAMS: She was San Francisco.
HEYE: That's what I thought.
WILLIAMS: OK, but here's the thing.
HUNT: The stand-up fact-checkers have not overseen this segment.
WILLIAMS: Sorry, sorry, sorry, fact-checkers. No, but that's exactly it, though. Like, just think about we are reliving the 1990s and the power of this franchise. We take reality T.V. for granted today. There was one, I think it's called "The American Family" from PBS in the 1970s. But reality T.V. wasn't a thing. MTV created it and gave us everything from "The Real World," to "Jersey Shore," which is kind of a joke, to pretty much everything we watch these days.
HEYE: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why you got to be personal?
WILLIAMS: I'm the one from New Jersey here.
HEYE: I was born in New Jersey on the Jersey Shore.
WILLIAMS: Fine, fine.
HUNT: Doug is in New Jersey.
WILLIAMS: I forgot, I forgot.
HUNT: I will say, somewhere in my storage unit, I have a copy, a VHS copy, because it was somehow the only way they could get it to me, of Sean Duffy on "The Real World."
SOTOMAYOR: No way.
HUNT: From when he ran in 2010, a Democratic operative sent it to me as oppo research. Clearly, he got elected to Congress. Now he's the Secretary of Transportation.
[12:48:04]
Anyway, on that note, coming up next here, we're going to dig into something totally different, the Phillies fan who literally stepped up to the plate.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HUNT: All right, welcome back. This week, a Philadelphia Phillies fan won an auction to call an inning on the radio for the team. You may or may not listen to sports on the radio, but it is a very specific art. And this man's performance was, well, just listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's a thrill to be here. It's a lifelong dream to be in the Phillies broadcast booth. So here we go. Painter with the first pitch to Ortiz. It's in there for strike one call. Fills with two in the bottom of the second to take the lead. As we start the top of the third, Painter delivers. It's bounced foul.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: I'm sorry. What? Just a reminder, that's just a fan. It's not a professional sports broadcaster. I mean, they could have let him do the whole game. Seventy-three-year-old retiree, lifelong Phillies fan, Lewis Kalb. He paid about $22,000 at an auction that the team hosts every year. He spends his retirement as a substitute teacher and has done play-by-play announcing for school and rec leagues. He told "The Athletic" that he was nervous before the game and studied the pronunciation of players' names and their positions.
But all those notes, yes, they got soggy in the rain outside the ballpark. And Lewis says he's always dreamed of doing play-by-play at the professional level. He even once auditioned for the Philadelphia 76ers radio job. But now the 73-year-old says, "For the rest of my life, I'm always able to say I was a big league announcer for the Philadelphia Phillies. Nobody knows whether it was one inning or ten seasons. I'm still in that group."
I mean, Paul's just so funny. I always worry that it's going to be a dying art announcing baseball on the radio because I love listening to baseball games. I mean, it's just a really unique way of enjoying it. And, like, for this guy to be able to have this experience, and, I mean, this was how Roy Wood reacted. Dude is too nice with it. Other boys in the booth better than me. He's coming for their job. A real hater would have unplugged his mic.
BEGALA: I just love that. It is an art. And radio is so very intimate. After he finished being governor of California, Ronald Reagan was offered another T.V. gig or another radio gig. He chose radio because he knew that that was more intimate. He wanted to be in our cars and in our living rooms, and it worked out well for Reagan. I think that same effect, you know, a whole two generations of people in L.A. grew up with Vin Scully calling the games there. John Miller was calling them in Baltimore for a long time.
[12:55:18]
HUNT: Yes, he was.
BEGALA: An amazing announcer.
HUNT: Yes.
BEGALA: You get, I don't know any of these people, but you feel like you know them.
HUNT: Right, you do.
BEGALA: And it's just wonderful. And congratulations to Mr. Kalb. He's got a future in that business.
HUNT: Yes, congratulations indeed. We all send it out to you, sir. Congratulations.
All right, thanks to my panel. Really appreciate you all being here. Thanks to you at home for watching. Don't forget, you can see The Arena every weekday right here on CNN. We're live at 4:00 p.m. Eastern time. You can also catch up by listening to the Arena's podcast. You can follow us on X and Instagram. We're at TheArenaCNN. Do enjoy the rest of your weekend. Thank you for spending part of it with us. The news continues next on CNN.
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