Former DNC chair Jaime Harrison launches a podcast — and invites Hunter Biden as an early guest

The former president of the National Democratic Committee, Jaime Harrison, returns to the political arena with a new podcast while – and his party – seek to rebound to lose the White House last year.

In a great conversation with NBC News before the launch of the podcast, Harrison formulated itself as not fhacklé by the “Strength Tandaus” of the sensitivities of leading the National Party and argued that the Democrats can rebuild confidence with the Americans is to embrace their more authentic self.

“We need more votes that are anchored in the Democratic Party, because some of the podcasts that are available are more often criticized the Democratic Party instead of really promoting the assets and leaders we have,” he said.

The first episodes of “At Our Table” present interviews with three well -known party leaders: the governor of Minnesota Tim Walz, the governor of Maryland Wes Moore and the representative of South Carolina Jim Clyburn. But the list of Harrison’s first guests also includes Hunter Biden – Joe Biden’s son whose trade relations, drug addiction and legal problems were among the political attacks against the former president. Biden’s decision to forgive his son after being found guilty of three accusations of criminal firearms also aroused condemnation through the political spectrum.

When he was asked why he wanted to interview Hunter Biden, which many democrats considered a political vulnerability to the president of the time and his party, Harrison told NBC News that he wanted to repel the “caricature” of the son of the former president. The episode will be released next week.

“When I watch Hunter and the conversations I have had with him in the past four years, this guy is really brilliant, he is intelligent, he is very passionate about things on service and helping people,” said Harrison. “But you know, I did not have the chance to see him because of my interactions with him. When you ask most people, they have no idea. All they know is what Marjorie Taylor Green would say about Hunter or what his political allies or his political opponents would say.”

“He has probably become one of the greatest caricatures in politics today,” said Harrison. “And I thought it would be interesting for people to understand who Hunter Biden or what makes him vibrate.”

While Harrison said that he was proud of his work at the head of the national party, he hopes that he will be “even better post-president than I was president”.

“When President Carter has died, you think a lot, and the only thing I learned of his years is that I think he considered himself a better president of Post than he was,” he said.

“And as I think about my time as president, I hope that I can be even better post-president than I was a chair, and to really do things that fascinate me, that is to say a re-emergence of a new South, to see the Democratic Party reintegrate his job in the southern states,” said Harrison.

One way in which Harrison plans to work towards this objective is to start the efforts of the PAC of the Democrats of Dirt Road, its political group which still retains the fundraising list which propelled its candidacy for the Senate in 2020, which established fundraising records at the time.

Loyalty in Biden

The decision to welcome Hunter Biden to one of his inaugural podcast episodes testifies to the loyalty that Harrison continues to show towards the former president. In an extract from the interview with Hunter Biden, he told Harrison that the Democrats “lost the election because we did not remain faithful to the party leader”.

When he was asked if he agreed with Hunter Biden, Harrison criticized the Democrats for having been so fast for kicking the president of the time at the sidewalk after his performance of debate widely swept away last June, by comparing them to the way the Republicans continued to rally around President Donald Trump even when he was found guilty of crimes.

“If the waters become a little jerky, some of the people in our group are the fastest to abandon the ship, rush, then burn the damn ship when they go down,” said Harrison.

“Not to say that it is always the right thing that the Republicans have done, but sometimes the Democrats need to sit and stop and think of the long -term ramifications of this anticipated abandonment because I can tell you that this did not correspond well to the basis of the party, especially to black voters,” said Harrison. “I remember a gathering in Georgia just after the debate and people were upset. They are black men and older and older women who were so upset that the party almost made Joe Biden, stabbing it in the back.”

Harrison did not say directly if he agreed with Hunter Biden that the Democrats lost “because” of the lack of loyalty to Biden. But as he has repeatedly made the former vice-president Kamala Harris both as a candidate (comparing her to the basketball megastar Michael Jordan) and a faithful vice-president, he also gave a passionate defense of the legacy of Biden in the middle of the decision of many Democrats of the call to dismiss it.

“We have probably seen the greatest legislative president we had since LBJ, and it’s just objectively speaking,” said Harrison, adding that Biden was more focused on “the reconstruction of the Democratic Party” than any president for “long”.

He added: “There was a reason why we had to be faithful to the president. Of course, was he old? Hey, he was old, and he knew he was old as if we all knew that he was old. But you don’t elect a president because they are young or they look good in a suit or what you have. You choose them to do shit.”

Party state

Harrison is one of the many democratic politicians who started podcasts following the 2024 elections, at a time when the party image fell to a historic hollow and when the Democrats deplored the inability of their party to gain from the traction in the sphere of the podcast, in particular young men.

Harrison told NBC News that he thought that the party needed more votes in new media spaces “anchored in the Democratic Party because some of the podcasts that are more often criticized the Democratic Party instead of really promoting the assets and leaders we have.”

But he also admitted that the Democratic Party can be too dependent on “discussion points that are not founded in any emotion”, a strategy that can lead voters to feel disconnected from them.

He connected this discussion to his “frustration” with the media strategy of the Harris campaign, supervising the decision not to make her sit for more interviews in the first weeks of his presidential candidacy as “professional fault” and shifting the decision to put handcuffs “on Walz after joining the ticket.

“We are so afraid of our shadows sometimes in our party that we lose that, we enter our own heads, we become so academic and cerebral,” said Harrison, saying that Democrats should strive to level with voters and to be “real”.

“It makes you more relatable in the spaces to which you may not be relatable, right? Because people see one side of you that they normally have the opportunity to see. They see your passion, they see things that give you joy, they see things that frustrate you. And it is really important, that you are not just a caricature.”