Pod Save America - “To impeach or not to impeach.”

Episode Date: March 14, 2019

Nancy Pelosi throws cold water on the idea of impeaching Donald Trump, Paul Manafort had a very bad Wednesday, Beto O’Rourke launches his presidential campaign, and Peter Hamby warns Democrats not to run their campaigns via Twitter. Then Senator Sherrod Brown talks to Jon about his decision not to run, the dignity of work, the Senate’s dysfunction, and how Democrats can win in 2020. Also – Pod Save America is going on tour! Get your tickets now: crooked.com/events.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Later in the pod, you'll hear a conversation I had with Senator Sherrod Brown. But first, we've got to talk about the news from Nancy Pelosi's recent comments about impeachment, to Paul Manafort's very, very bad Wednesday, to Beto O'Rourke's announcement, and all the latest from the 2020 campaign trail. Lots to talk about today.

Check out our new pod, Save the World. Ben and Tommy talk about the ongoing disaster that is Brexit. The UK's Trump. They're Brexit. On Keep It, hilarious Keep It, they talk about the SAT scandal that's unfolded here in Los Angeles and Hollywood and all

across the country, really. And their guest is Mandy Moore, who's fantastic. Also, there's still some tickets left to our shows in Boston and New Hampshire. We will be there in April. Check it out. Crooked.com slash events. We'd love to see you there she has some great

guests uh Heather McGee is co-hosting with us in Boston we're lucky to have her interviewed here in the wilderness she's brilliant and our good pal Alyssa Mastromonaco joins us in New Hampshire go buy Alyssa's book so here's the thing it's doing really well and we'll be talking to her tonight about it we got a little event in LA I just did an event with Alyssa in San Francisco and we were in Seattle on Monday night. It's like the crowds have been great. She's the, her stories are hilarious. Uh, you guys can have a blast. I can't wait. I can't wait. And, uh, and I'll be doing it with Tommy and Aaron Ryan. So good crew. All right, let's get to the news. Nancy Pelosi made some big news this week when she told the Washington Post that she's, quote, not for impeachment of Donald Trump, saying, quote,

Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don't think we should go down that path because it divides the country and he's just not worth it. The president responded Wednesday on Twitter, writing, quote, I greatly appreciate Nancy Pelosi's statement against impeachment, but everyone must remember the minor fact that I never did anything wrong. She's like a genuinely... I think Trump's actually getting better at Twitter. Genuinely funny line.

So, Dan, I guess my first question is, why did Pelosi say that, especially now, before Mueller's finished before Congress has had a chance to fully investigate all of Trump's potential crimes and abuses of power Nancy Pelosi unlike most people in politics never says anything by accident right like this is a well thought out thing she didn't just like walk into an interview and then get asked a question she didn't expect to then say this. She thought that she obviously thought this through. And I don't know, like we don't have any sourcing that tells us why she did it. But my guess, having watched Nancy Pelosi work very closely for many years, is that she wants to be the one who takes the slings and arrows for her caucus. And by that, I mean, this is a very,

the question of impeachment, for a whole host of reasons that we'll get into, is very divisive among the caucus. There are some people who want it to happen right now. There are others who think the standard has not yet been met. There are others who think even if the standard has been met, the problem we have is that no matter what we do in the House, Mitch McConnell will give Trump a get out of jailof-jail-free card. So what is the point? And there's activist pressure, whether it's the ads and stuff that Tom Steyer's group is doing, whether it's just people who genuinely think that we should not have a criminal in the White House. So now this gives every Democrat the ability to blame Nancy Pelosi, not themselves, for why impeachment is not happening.

She takes the agency away from them and gives it to herself because she's in a safe seat. She doesn't have to worry about that. And so I think she is doing what good leaders do. Mitch McConnell does the bizarre evil version of this where he does things like destroy the Constitution and then take all the blame for it and let swing Republican senators get away for it. Nancy Pelosi is doing sort of the opposite here in sort of protecting her members politically. I guess my question is on timing, right? Like, you know, Elizabeth Warren was asked this question the other day, and I thought she had a pretty great answer. Warren said, here's my rule on this one. Let's wait until we get the Mueller report, combine it with everything else we've seen, then we'll know what to do. Seems like it seems pretty easy to just continue to say that, even if you're a

Democrat who is on the fence about impeachment, might be worried about impeachment, or might be very in favor of impeachment. Yes, that's 100% right. And that is the answer I would have given were I to have been asked if I were in Nancy Pelosi's shoes. But what we don't have a, you know, I'm trying to like project how she's seen this. But we don't have a window into – and this is always something you have to think about when you understand why congressional leaders do certain things is we don't know the conversations that are happening inside her caucus when they get together for lunch every Tuesday or whatever day that is. We don't know what pressure people feel. We don't know if there are people who are about to break. People feel – we don't know if there are people who are about to break. Like it could be that you could have some Democrats who are going to – freshman Democrats maybe who are going to push for it right away and she's trying to head that off of the pass.

Or a bunch of moderate Democrats who are about to come out. Moderate is not even the right word, but maybe sort of Democrats in swing districts maybe to come out themselves and take it off the table. She's doing them a favor we i just yeah i think nancy pelosi has earned the benefit of the doubt from us and everyone else in the country that there is a method to this madness and it's probably smarter than we are so one person who i think disagrees is our own brian boitler editor-in-chief here at cricket media he wrote a piece arguing that by saying that impeachment has to be bipartisan and he focused in on on the word bipartisan that pelosi used quote what pelosi really did was affirm that democrats long ago gave the republican party a silent veto over whether

trump should be held accountable for anything brian's argument is basically like you know she said unless there's something compelling and overwhelming and so that gives her plenty of room to change her mind because Mueller could, you know, announce something that's very compelling. But having the standard of impeachment being bipartisan there sort of allows Republicans to basically decide what is impeachable or not. And, you know, it seems pretty unlikely that Republicans will decide anything is impeachable. I don't know. What do you think of Brian's argument? I disagree vehemently with Brian on a couple of levels. But let me set the table first, which is I think Donald Trump is dangerously unfit for office.

He should be removed from office for any host of reasons. Breaking news. For any host of reasons, right? He – even if you like – if Mueller submitted a ream of blank paper, there is still multiple evidence that – there's certainly sufficient evidence that Trump should be removed from office. conspiracy to defraud the electorate on the Stormy Daniels payments. You could do it on the mere fact that he was involved in a financial deal with Russia and then lied about it on multiple occasions. There are multiple examples of abuse of power related to and unrelated to the Russia investigation. There is the mere fact that he is too stupid, too attention deprived, too narcissistic to run the country. He is so uninterested in just what the job of president is that he is a danger to the country, to American democracy, to the planet.

Like for all reasons, he should be gone. Yeah. I mean, look, Adam Schiff said as much the other day, and he's basically on the same page as Pelosi with impeachment. Schiff said there's evidence available already that shows that Trump should be indicted or that Trump would be indicted if he weren't president. And there was some DOJ guidelines against indicting a sitting president, because if Michael Cohen pled guilty to this scheme to pay hush money to defraud the electorate, and we know from the indictment that Donald Trump directed that scheme,

then in most cases where the person directing the scheme and the conspiracy isn't President of the United States, that person would be indicted. Yes, that is exactly right. And let's not pretend that the standard that we should hold our presidents to is guilty of a felony beyond a reasonable doubt. If that was the standard, then presidents would be up for indictment and we would treat them like normal criminals who would have to go before a jury of their peers and with the guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

We set up a different approach for different reasons, which suggests that things that may not be criminal may also be impeachable. You could have an array of actions together that each individual one may not be something Right. We already put ourselves in a box if the idea is we haven't proven a crime, therefore he gets to stay. The problem we have – here's the reasons which I disagree with Brian. One is that Nancy Pelosi did not – she said this in an interview. She did not etch it into stone and put it on the side of the Capitol. She gave herself an out to revisit this question.

Now, there is also the point that as long as we live in a world where you are going to require Republican senators to convict a president and remove them from office, it is by nature bipartisan. Nancy Pelosi has not given that away. The founders gave that away. That is a fact. And so the question I think we as Democrats have to ask ourselves is, what is the value in starting an impeachment inquiry, heading to a vote in the House? It would probably be a very close vote because I think that there's going to be a lot of Democrats who, on their face, absent something incredibly new and compelling that Nancy Pelosi left us or out, absent that, are they like, we're going to have Democrats do this vote knowing that Trump is not only, he's going to get a verdict of not guilty from the Senate that he will then use to proclaim his innocence of all crimes going forward. It is like, what is the value of that? I'm not saying it's not valuable, but I think that is a question we have to ask ourselves. Merely putting a scarlet eye on his ill-fitting suit going forward, is that something that is worthy of this effort? Is that something that has value in the long run

historically? Does it have value in the short run politically? And this is not like we are sloughing off our moral obligation in terms of politics is that we have to get this man out of office right like that has to happen and the only way that is going to happen is at the ballot box in the next two years and so that is like how asking how this effort affects that is not a light question. That is a very serious question. It's one we should look at. We should not take lightly in this case. And then the last thing I'd say is the anti-policy is also not saying we're going to stop looking

into Trump. We're going to end all the investigations and just pass health care bills and tax cuts for the rest of the next two years. There is still going to be a massive apparatus that is digging into every element of the Trump corruption and criminality agenda and looking for that compelling piece of evidence that Nancy Pelosi references. So I don't really know what has changed here, although Nancy Pelosi has volunteered to be the one to take the blame for something that was going to happen anyway. So a few things on that. So I think that's a great point. Like that is, I struggle with this one myself, right? Because I think everything you outlined there is correct. I will make the other

side of the argument. You asked like, what does it get us to do this if we know that Republicans aren't going to convict him in the Senate, which I think we all know is highly, highly unlikely. I guess they're, I mean, look, the one thing I do that always goes through my mind is when the BuzzFeed story came out saying that Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie, that Trump's suborned perjury, right? And of course, they had to like walk that back a little bit. But in the end, it sort of was mostly true, but not totally true. When that happened on that day, there were like even people on Fox News saying, oh, well, if he's suborned perjury, this really the president really could be in trouble. This could be it,

you know. And so like there may be something we're not imagining that is so big and so obvious, the crime that he may have committed that, you know, maybe you get the 13 Republicans you need in the Senate to get this done or 17 17, I think it is, actually. I don't know. I think that's highly, highly unlikely. So let's put that aside. So why would you go through a trial knowing that he doesn't get convicted in the end? Well, if the House votes for impeachment, now keep in mind, if they vote for impeachment with very good evidence of everything that we just talked about, plus more more if there is evidence of abuse of power obstruction of justice of participation in multiple criminal conspiracies if they have all that they have them dead to rights on all that and they impeach him it goes to the senate there is a

trial in the senate presiding over the trial is the chief justice of the supreme court and trump is running for re-election and every day there is a trial in the Senate, wall-to-wall coverage. John Roberts is presiding over it. People are presenting evidence of Donald Trump's crimes and abuses of power. There are potentially witnesses that come before the Senate. It is a fucking spectacle.

And the other thing we know is that we are sort of in a race between now and 2020 to see who can be in the news more, Donald Trump or the Democrats running for president. And Donald Trump in the news for an extended period of time with a highlight on all of the crimes he committed, that may give some of these up for grabs voters some pause. You could argue that. Now, you could also argue that it becomes such a spectacle that people, most voters, recoil from it and say, oh, what is Washington doing? They're just going after Trump. It doesn't seem compelling. These Democrats should actually be doing something that affects my lives. You could also make that argument, too, which is why it's a tough one.

But that, to me, is all, that's the politics around it. And I've said this before. There's also a question of sort of constitutional obligation. Like if you are Congress and there is evidence that the president has committed high crimes and misdemeanors and you do not move forward with impeachment on that evidence because you were worried about one party not fully agreeing with you, then you are essentially saying nothing the president does is impeachable because we're worried about the politics or like we can't impeach the president because we're worried about the politics or we don't think the politics will work out in our favor or we don't think he'll be convicted and so you are then not sort of having any kind of accountability for the president's crimes

so that that can be another problem too i think so a couple points on that one i think that you raise a really good question about let's just talk about the politics for a sec. Yeah. And I want to stipulate a couple of things before just people destroy my already destroyed mentions. But is – as I said before, I think Trump should be impeached. He should be removed from office. I just wish we lived in a world where Mitch McConnell was not giving get-out-of-jail-free cards to authoritarian racists. Two, I don't know what the politics are. I honestly don't. It could be good politics.

It could be bad politics. We just don't know. I think it is a fair point if you know what the end result is going to be, which that could change barring some other piece of evidence. Let's say the Mueller report is what we think it is going to be, right? Where there's not a smoking gun beyond the, I guess there's not a large smoking gun beyond the smaller smoking guns we already have a whole bunch of things. And there's not something

that could dramatically shift the politics of this. Even, I don't even, I'm even skeptical that there's any piece of evidence that anyone could conceive that would cause the Republicans to remove Trump from office. Like guilty of murder would be as close as you could possibly get, and I'm even skeptical about that because they would just argue self-defense. and you're thinking about how this plays in the context of the 2020 election, then I think you have to think not just about how the day-to-day dominating of the news of this evidence being presented would be.

I think you have to really think about what happens on the day the Senate votes and Trump is not guilty. Innocent man. Witch hunt. No collusion. I win. Trump is an innocent man. Which hunt? No collusion. I win. Yeah. Think about the tweets.

Think about, like, this is it. We've proven it. I am innocent. And the less than responsible way in which I think the media will probably cover said determination. And so that is something to think about. Yeah. said determination. And so that is something to think about. I wrestle with this so much because we do have this constitutional obligation. We also have this moral imperative to make sure that Trump loses in 2020. And teaching a class in long-term historical constitutional law while

distracting us from the immediate task at hand is something that gives me great pause. Yeah. And look, this is another example of the limits of polling and research and focus groups and all the rest, because I guarantee you there are Democratic strategists who have, you know, conducted focus groups and polled people. And they've said, yeah, of course, you know, Congress should hold Trump accountable. We're all for that. Should he be impeached? Impeachment? I don't know about that, you know, and I'm, I kind of want Congress to focus on, you know, things that will improve my life. And those Democratic strategies take those results back, and they talk to Democratic politicians about it. And you know,

they're all wary about impeachment. But we don't know, like you said, we cannot predict how the country would react. We can predict how Trump's base would react. We can predict how our base will react. We cannot predict how the broader country will react when presented on live TV for multiple weeks with evidence of criminality and abuse of power on behalf of the president. We just we cannot predict it. And so the question is. That's correct. The question is, if you're a Democrat, do you believe that the evidence is compelling enough to move and shape public opinion, or are you going to look at where public opinion is now and let that guide your decisions? And I think politically there's no great answer to that. I think it's very tough. But I guess I probably come down where Elizabeth Warren is, which is, let's wait to see what the Mueller report reveals, let's combine it with everything else we know, and then let's make the decision there.

I think that's probably the best bet for right now. Yeah, that is right. That's where I am. I think Nancy Pelosi's statement, like there's a question of why she did politics that we discuss, but it also raises, as Brian's column uses it, as a hook to raise this larger question. Brian's column uses it as a hook to raise this larger question. And the last thing I'd say on this is Brian is right that Democrats have a constitutional obligation to do their duty regardless of the politics. I think that that is a fact. It is hampered by the fact that you don't know for sure, but you have a very good reason to believe how the process will end.

Sure, but you have a very good reason to believe how the process will end because, as you said, we can't predict how the country at large will react to a trial, new revelations, et cetera, but we can predict how the Trump base will react. If you can predict how the Trump base will react, you can predict how the Republican senators will react. And so therefore, you know – I just did like political algebra there. But therefore, you know, I just did like political algebra there, but therefore, you know how that trial ends. And I do think it's hard to be like Democrats saying, well, you know, we know this isn't going to end well and we have a constitutional obligation to do it. So we're going to go down this path because of the Constitution. While on the other side of the Capitol, Mitch McConnell is wiping his mouth with the Constitution as he drinks the blood of American democracy. It's just – it seems like there is an asymmetry to how we view our roles and responsibilities in government.

I hope Jesse can make that art for today's episode. Yes. Mitch McConnell jokes are really one of my favorite. Well, now that Paul Ryan is not here anymore It's what you got Speaking of high crimes Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort Had a pretty bad Wednesday Pretty pretty pretty bad

First judge Amy Berman Jackson Sentenced him to an additional 73 months in prison for a combination of financial crimes and obstruction of justice. And when you combine that with his first sentence, he's now facing a maximum of seven and a half years in prison. To make things worse for Paul, right after the sentence was handed down, Manafort was charged by Manhattan's district attorney with committing more than a dozen state crimes in New York, crimes that Donald Trump cannot pardon him for. Dan, what's your reaction to the sentence? Is it right? Is it fair? Too lenient? Too stringent? I have a lot of complicated thoughts about this, which is the main takeaway from everything that has involved Paul Manafort. Mm-hmm. a foreign government and lied about it and so he's committed multiple crimes and he is going to go to jail for less time than many low-level drug offenders go to jail and he will probably go to a nicer jail than many low-level drug offenders go to jail and so like that like that's a reminder

that it our criminal justice system is fucked up and should be fixed. And at the same time, if you agree with that statement that Manafort's not getting enough time in prison based on how much time people who are not white, less wealthy, less connected, how much time they get in jail. There's one way to look at it. Well, Manafort should get more time in jail. And I don't – like that I sort of am resistant to as well. It's like I don't really give a shit how long Paul Manafort spends in jail. Like that's not going to make the best way to balance out the scales of the criminal justice system is not to put people like Paul Manafort in jail longer. It's to put people on the other end of spectrum in jail for less long. Totally.

Different jails. Totally. Like it's just like so like kind of recoiled at this like give them life and it's like who i don't get any joy from paul manafort being in jail and it doesn't make me feel any better about how terrible our criminal justice system is we have far too many people incarcerated in this country and we've talked about a lot the candidates are talking about about it, and it is awful. But I agree. I don't want to see Paul Manafort.

Paul Manafort's almost 70 years old. He's going to serve six and a half years in prison, maybe the full seven and a half. And that's pretty old to be spending that long in prison. That's a good amount of time in prison. All these cases that people are tweeting about, there was one lawyer, Scott Hetchinger, who said, tweeted, my client was offered 36 to 72 months for stealing $100 worth of quarters from a residential laundry room. That's the stuff that we need to work on, whether they're minor drug offenses or just minor offenses in general. The idea that people could get less than Paul

Manafort for what he did for, you know, a minor drug offense or minor theft or something like that is absurd. And the disparities in our criminal justice system are absurd. I think the other thing is, and Matt Iglesias pointed this out, he said it shouldn't take a special counsel to catch a tax cheat. And noting that Paul Manafort's lawyers in the courtroom argued, one of their big arguments for a linear sentence, more lenient sentence was Manafort wouldn't have been charged if he hadn't been Trump's campaign manager, if he hadn't been caught up in the special counsels. It's like, yeah, well, that's a problem because he committed a bunch of crimes. You know, like we don't invest enough in prosecuting and discovering white collar

crimes in this country. And, you know, the FBI doesn't have as much of a budget for it. We don't pay attention to it. And I do think, you know, that one policy consideration to come out of this, and I hope some of the Democratic candidates talk about it, is what kind of attorney general they're going to appoint, how they're going to staff the political appointees at the Justice Department, what kind of budget they're going to give to the part of the Justice Department and the part of the FBI that goes after white collar crimes. Because I do think that people are very tired, very sick and tired of this country of people who are wealthy and well off and connected, just getting away with all kinds of crimes. And so while I don't think Paul Manafort should spend longer in jail than he got sentenced for, I do think that more Paul Manaforts who commit the crimes he's committed

should be prosecuted. And, you know, I think that's fair. Yeah, that is right. And there's no question about it. I think there is this question. This has made me – this is something we've been talking about for a while and thinking about for a while is it just raises the question of like is prison the right concept at all for nonviolent offenders? imprison the right concept at all for nonviolent offenders, whether it's tax cheats or people on the other end of the spectrum, or whether, you know, low level drug offender, for instance, right? Is that like, is the fact that we just throw people in cages for years at a time,

like, it's so fucking medieval. And there is like, I would like to see candidates talk in bold ways about how you change that like like the mass incarceration policy in this country is it's medieval it's insane and we should do something about it and not that like a lot of money the martyr for this is not the example for it but it like we should try to find opportunities to talk about it where we can. And so yes, we should prosecute more tax cheats. Is throwing them in jail, is that any better off than throwing low-level drug offenders in jail? Is there other ways that they can pay a debt to society beyond just paying back the wages, whether it's service or something? I just think that we need to widen the thinking on criminal justice in this country, whether it's for Paul Manafort or more importantly, millions of other Americans who are stuck in jail for crimes that are in many cases for doing

something that is now legal in many states. Yeah. And I think, you know, I'd love to talk to more prosecutors and defense attorneys and activists about this, but you know, I do think you need some sort of a deterrent for people so that they know that if they commit a crime, there's going to be some kind of a punishment. Right. Like, I think deterrents work in many cases. In some cases, they don't work. But so you're right. You do need to figure out. Without a doubt, we have to solve mass incarceration in this country. Let me ask you, from a political standpoint, should the Democratic candidates in some way be talking about the fact that Donald Trump's campaign manager, deputy

campaign manager, national security advisor, and personal lawyer have all been convicted of crimes and sentenced to prison? I guess Gates is still almost getting sentenced. He's still cooperating. Or is there just no chance that any, you know, up for grabs voters care about this? Like, how much should this sort of rampant criminality that at least been proven definitively around Trump and in the people he hires in his orbit, both in the on Twitter, the media covers, and actual voters who may decide this election are just like, it just, it doesn't matter to them as much. You know, I think this, there's probably a complicated answer to this question. It matters both how you talk about it, which voters you're referring to, etc. you talk about it, which voters you're referring to, etc. I mean, I do think it's indicative of at least my own personal or our personal views, that we've talked about fucking Paul Manafort for so long that instead of talking about him, we decided to try to have a long discursive discussion about criminal justice reform, just because I can't talk about Paul Manafort and his crimes anymore without wanting to bang my head against a wall.

I don't think that's indicative of anything other than how a certain small segment of podcasters feel about this. I think the criminality and corruption of the division that Trump has sowed in this country, to try to return us to a world where we're not talking about the president every single day. Right. The Trump era seems and feels terrible. And can we get to him back to a more normal life in this country? I was actually struck by the other day, which was the day that the college admissions scandal broke and there was a lot of news about the Boeing plane that was or wasn't being grounded. And if you looked at Twitter that day or turned on cable news, it felt like 2014. It felt like what cable and Twitter were like before Trump came down the escalator. We're talking about celebrity crimes and airplanes as opposed to a minute by minute breaking down of every Trump tweet, everything he says. What are the criminal law implications of this tweet or this action?

All of which are very legitimate, important stories, but it is all consuming. I went on a little tangent there, but I think we should talk about the criminality and corruption. I actually think the corruption part of what Trump has done is going to be more persuasive to voters than a debate about collusion, right? And so there is this part where you're going to like, should we talk about the campaign manager being in jail? Yes. Should we also talk about the cabinet secretaries have been forced to leave because they're doing business with special interests, who are advocating against the interests of the public? Should we be talking about the fact that the person who's currently in charge of the EPA is a lobbyist from the fossil fuel industry? There are lots of elements of pure corruption where you can make a case that Trump is putting

himself first. We've said this before. The message against Trump, I think, is that Trump's agenda is me first, not America first. And the corruption is a huge part of that. The part where I think the criminality is relevant is if you can make the case that it is a distraction from the things that matter to voters. Look at all the things we can't do because our president is enmeshed in these criminal inquiries, right? It's sort of the flip side of the presidential harassment measures that Trump is doing. Look, I think that it doesn't necessarily even have to be all about Trump as well. I mean, for some time, people have felt that there are wealthy and powerful people in this country, throughout the world, a wealthy and powerful elite who game the system in order to enrich themselves, enrich their friends, gain more power. order to enrich themselves, enrich their friends, gain more power. And to do that, they will,

you know, sell out voters. They'll sell out their country. They'll bend the rules. They'll break the laws. And this is why people are fed up with politics and fed up with, you know, how the economy works for them. And Trump and his administration are a perfect symbol of that. We have those people running the government. And as they run the government, they have made every effort over the last couple of years to divide us against each other. And so while we're all distracted and we're all fighting, we're all yelling at each other, they're cleaning up. They're getting richer. And they're getting richer by breaking the rules. They're getting richer and they're getting richer by breaking the rules.

And so I think that's an incredibly important storyline for Democrats to talk about in the 2020 election. And as long as just it's broader than Trump, because the problem is broader than Trump and the problem preceded Trump. It just happened to be that all that white collar crime, all that criminality, all that corruption that we've been talking about about that's been, you know, our politics has been rife with for so long. Now it's at the highest levels of our government in a way that it hasn't been before. But, you know, and as folks have pointed out too, it also exposes sort of this like rampant corruption that happens all around the globe. People taking advantage of the global economy to get rich, whether it's offshore bank accounts or money laundering or whatever it might be. And meanwhile, there's a lot of people hurting, a lot of people who can barely pay the rent or go see a doctor. And I think that message, and look, you see Bernie Sanders talking about, that's his original message. Elizabeth Warren

probably has an even sharper message on this in terms of just rigging the system and rigging the rules themselves. She's been talking about that for quite some time. And I think it's a potent message in 2020. Yeah, that message has always been effective. It's a updated version of the Obama ran on in 2008. And Trump is a perfect candidate to make that message against because he is a walking conflict of interest, right? I mean, it's just so important to note that message against because he is a walking conflict of interest right he is i mean it's just so important to note that he has a hotel that special interests who have policy questions before the government go book as many rooms as they possibly can as a way to try to influence those decisions in their favor because that money that is basically a way to put

mar-a-lago is the same thing. These are ways in which we have – Trump has put himself in a position by not divesting from his businesses, by not adhering to either government ethics rules or basic standards of moral decency where he makes it possible for people who want to influence policy to put money in his pocket indirectly and let him know very easily that they are doing that and try to gain his favor. So Trump is the perfect person to make that message against. You just have to be a candidate who is disciplined enough to wade through all the ephemeral shit that comes with Trump, right? Are you going to get distracted by the fact that he called Beto O'Rourke crazy this morning? Are you going to get distracted by his tweets about airplane computers being too complicated? Are you going to get distracted by lies tweeting Fox News at 11 a.m.? Are you going to be able to be disciplined enough to make the – Trump is rigging the system against you to help people like him.

Are you disciplined enough to make that message? That I think is going to be a real question that as Democrats are trying to figure out who can win, like who can do that without chasing Trump down every stupid rabbit hole? Yeah, if you're a farmer who's been hurt by Trump's tariffs, do you have enough money to stay in his hotel so you can influence him? Do you have enough money for a Mar-a-Lago membership? For a Mar-a-Lago membership, if you're someone whose factory closed down, whose Trump promised he'd bring back jobs to the Midwest and factories closed down anyway, can you afford the Mar-a-Lago membership so you can influence his policy? Because the rich people can who run his administration, they get to influence his policy all the time.

But you can't because you don't have the money. I mean, it seems like a pretty simple message to me. Okay, on to 2020. After months of speculation, former three-term congressman and one-time Texas Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke announced that he's running for president via email and announcement video this morning, Thursday morning, saying, quote, this is a defining moment of truth for this country. The challenges that we face right now, the interconnected crises in our economy, our democracy, and our climate have never been greater. No one candidate or president, no matter how tough or talented or experienced, can meet these challenges on their own.

Only this country can do that, and only if we build a movement that includes all of us. He also told the El Paso Times in an interview, one of the reasons he's running is that he has a firsthand perspective and experience from the border that's currently missing from the conversation. Dan, what is Beto's rationale? What are his strengths? And what will be his challenges? I think we should, let's start with the strengths and weaknesses. And I think we should stipulate that based on 2016, no one knows anything. So like, I believe these are his strengths, I believe these are his weaknesses. How much those strengths will help and how much those weaknesses will hurt is an open question that it will be determined by voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, other states, be determined by how events change between now and then, because what voters are looking for when they go caucus in February of next year can be very different than what they're looking for

in March of this year. But like, I think his strengths are pretty obvious, right? He was able to, in a Senate race, build a national movement. And that is more than just being able to raise a ton of money, which is incredibly impressive and incredibly important. And you'd have to put his very large grassroots donor base in the strengths column. But he was able to become a national figure of sorts while running for Senate, which is something that has actually never happened in my time in politics. I've never seen anything like that, somewhere to the point where there are, you know, Beto for Texas signs all across the country, right? I mean, obviously, in liberal hotbeds, a lot of places, but just be able to gather the

gain the nation's attention while running in a Senate race is something, right? And it means he starts off with a shocking amount of name ID for someone who has never actually served in the Senate. So that is a strength. He ran a Texas campaign that was innovative, interesting, and successful in the sense he obviously didn't win, but he was able to do things that no Democrat has done in Texas in generations. And were he able to replicate his performance with new voters, getting new voters to the polls, and persuading independents? If we were to replicate that performance in Texas in a general election across the country, he would flip a whole host of states that all the

states that Hillary lost to Trump that were swing states and some more. I'm not saying he can do that, but that is an argument that he can make, that he has a proven ability to win in red parts of the country, which actually very few of the Democrats who are running have that ability to say. I think it's basically like Beto and Pete Buttigieg right now. Klobuchar. Klobuchar. I mean, yeah, Minnesota is – I would have Minnesota in a swing state.

You're right. It's been a very long time since the Republicans won it. Yeah. But she has a better argument than if you were from California or New York. Right, right. You can do Hickenlooper. So I'd say there are people who have run in red states. There are people –

Purple states. There are people who have run in swing states. And there are a lot of people who are in deep blue states. Yeah, that's right. You know, California, Delaware, etc. But so that that is an argument like the deficit is or that I'm sorry, the weakness is untested on the national stage. He's going to have a higher burden to explain why him. Why now than other candidates who have been running for longer, who have been in the Senate, who've been in the national fight for a long time. There is a burden to congressmen with a brief tenure who lost a

Senate race. There's a higher burden to say, why me? This is the exact question that I tried to explore with Pete Buttigieg when he was here. High burden for a 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana. I thought Pete Buttigieg gave very good answers that both on Pod Save America and in the CNN town hall the other night, can Beto have an answer like that, where people say, oh, I get it. On paper, it seems crazy, but now that I've heard you explain why, I get it, and I am willing to consider you. So I think it's a challenge. I don't even know if it's a weakness, it's a challenge. And just being – he is doing this from a standing start. And that's a hard thing, right? He doesn't have a national staff.

He has not been planning this for a long time. He doesn't have – I think if I'm going to say today might be the first day he's ever been to Iowa, which is an unusual thing for a presidential candidate who usually has been there to campaign for people in the past. Because the idea of running for president is implanted in your mind once you get sworn into the Senate. So he's got a lot of work to do to catch up with where the candidates who have been planning for this longer already are. Yeah. Look, I think like many candidates, many of his strengths are also his weaknesses or challenges. Like I think he, as you noted, can command media attention in a way that few of the candidates running can command media attention. With that attention, it's not all just positive. It's also negative as well. I think reporters,

I've noticed reporters seem more skeptical of Beto O'Rourke than some of the other candidates. Some of them just openly criticize him. So there's a lot, you know, he's inspired a lot of like Twitter love and Twitter hate, right? And so I think there's, like you said, the bar is higher for him to make sure he answers questions in the right way. He gives details about his policies and his ideas in the right way, which he hasn't really done yet. You know, there's no policy section on his website just yet. Of course, he just announced today. But it's like, what is, you know, where does he stand on all the big issues? You know, in the 2017 Texas Senate campaign, gave an interview with

Jeff Stein, where he said, Yeah, I'm for Bernie's Medicare for all plan. I like it. I like the plan. He just it was when Bernie just came out with it. But you know, he's also said he's talked about sort of a Medicare public option to it's like, where does he stand on that? He said he likes the Green New Deal, the idea. But what are the details? So he's going to have to do all that like other candidates are. And, like, look, I think the candidates that are really leading in the ideas primary right now are Elizabeth Warren by far. And I guess you can make a case for Bernie Sanders because a lot of the ideas that these Democrats have embraced, Bernie proposed in 2016. So those are the two candidates.

Bernie's refereeing the ideas primary right now. For sure. For sure. And so it's not like every candidate has put forward big policy ideas, but there will be a greater burden on Beto to really talk about what he's for. And like you said, and to talk about the rationale for his candidacy. And I think that's the challenge. But look, he, I think the national media, and especially the Twitter pundits, have always sort of underestimated the ability to inspire people and to get people excited. You know, they did for a time when Obama was running as well. And so I do think that is a strength he has. But I think it's tough. I think it's in a crowded field with some of the most talented, diverse candidates we've had in a long time. Having just lost the Senate race and starting, you have a lot of answers to give. And you have probably less margin for error than some of the other candidates who've been at this for a while, especially since, like you said, you're going from a standing start. So that's tricky, too.

But I don't know. We'll see. It was good that he went right to Iowa today, right after he announced always good to be in Iowa. He seemed to get a good reception there. And, you know, I think we'll learn a lot more about him in the coming days, whether he can handle this race. Yeah, I just I want to add one thing that I should have mentioned in the weaknesses section is, even though he wasn't in Congress for a long time, he does have a voting record. And some of that voting record has come under scrutiny, that some of it has been, you know, sort of viewed as more centrist. When he was part of the New Deal coalition, he opposed Pelosi at one point, not this most recent iteration, but in the past. And so those are things he's going to have to explain. Every candidate is going to have to explain their

record. And he is. So and I do think like there's a very important context here, which is we have this incredibly talented, diverse field. We have these leading women candidates with African-American candidates, LGBT candidate. There's this huge, diverse field. And then in it comes a white guy with a relatively or at least comparatively short resume. And that becomes part of the burden of his rationale. Right? Like, what does he specifically offer? Like, why him? Why not them? And I think that is a context for this that he is going to have to navigate and is very important. And it's one that I think a lot of voters are going to want to explore as they think about it. He answered this a little bit in the Vanity Fair piece that came out last night, I guess. But I think it's going unique to Beto who's making this decision after the field has been mostly set and with a different, shorter resume than others. Yeah. And I'll say the other question he has to answer that sort of all the candidates, to me, it's one of the most important questions for all of them that we've been asking a lot of

them is, how are you going to get shit done? How are you going to get your agenda passed at a time when the country is more polarized and Washington is more gridlocked than ever before and the Republican Party refuses to compromise? Right. And, you know, we've gone through this many different times. We have people like Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Jay Inslee who have all said, you know, we could kill off the filibuster in the Senate or at least Elizabeth Warren said it's on the table. You know, we could kill off the filibuster in the Senate, or at least Elizabeth Warren said it's on the table. You know, Buttigieg was talking about packing the court or reforming the court. So there's some people who have procedural ideas on how to change rules to get their agenda passed because Republicans won't cooperate. Then you have the Betos and Cory Bookers and Joe Bidens. Can't exactly tell where Kamala Harris is on this yet, but who say, you know, we're going to bring people together in this country. And look, if you're talking about healing the division

and the polarization in the country, I think that's a strong message that could potentially have appeal for a lot of people in this country. If you're talking about how you're going to heal the division in Washington and work with Republicans to get things done, I have a lot more skepticism. It's as I know you do, because we've been in the White House for eight years when it didn't happen. And some of these candidates like, you know, Beto's talked about working with Republicans in Congress to get things done. And he's gotten some stuff done. So has Cory Booker. So has Sherrod Brown. So some of these people in the Senate. So was Elizabeth Warren, right? But they're all sort of like small legislative things that they've gotten done with Republicans. And that's great. You should talk about those things. But on the big stuff, the stuff that we're talking about could help solve the crises of our time. Climate change, health care, economic inequality. Those are big ticket items.

And I think you have to have a politics of division, that particularly divisive figures like Bill Clinton, who was impeached, George W. Bush, who did many horrible things and was the worst president in modern American history, Donald Trump included, if you could move beyond that, that we could have a different politics in Washington. And that is not true. We have to be fucking clear-eyed about who Republicans in Washington are, what their agenda is, how very specifically and strategically and assiduously they have an agenda to undermine democracy in this country for the purpose of keeping power for their billionaire friends. their billionaire friends. Mitch McConnell knows that there are more Democrats than Republicans in this country. And if demographic trends hold, there are going to be a lot more Democrats, Republicans in this country. So he is working to dilute your power and expand the power of the Koch brothers and people like them. And if you were naive about that, then you were going to

get shit done in Washington. And so I think the country outside of Washington and outside of the worst parts of the political fringes want to be more united and that that messaging of unity can work to try it. Like Trump has, we are a divided country, been divided for a lot of reasons for a long time. And Trump has fucking poured salt in that wound for personal and political gain for his party. And can you be someone who can heal those wounds and try to move us past that so that we're not at each other's throats out in the country, even if we were going to have to put on the armor and go to battle in Washington? That's a question. And I think those candidates who come in, I think voters, particularly the very savvy voters in the early primary states who take their role very seriously, are going to be

very skeptical of of the kumbaya candidates yeah look i mean part of the way that you heal the division in this country is to defeat the purveyors of division and those happen to be the republican leadership in washington right now that to me that's the way to square that circle all right so last 2020 thing i want to talk about is a story from our friend peter hamby in vanity fair who writes that the democratic primary is going to test, whether burgeoning public support for daring economic policies coincides with support for more hot burning cultural issues that seem to dominate Twitter in the Trump era. He then says, quote, having a set of organized

principles and a clear message as a candidate can be enough to inoculate a politician against the minute by minute demands of professional activists and angry tweeters, candidates who We have obviously had this discussion here many times before, which is why I wanted to bring up Peter's piece. But what do you think of this, Dan? Is this good advice? How much does, you know, what happens on Twitter actually matter? And, you know, I guess should we start by defining what we're talking about when we say Twitter, right? Like Twitter is, when we talk about the Twitter conversation, we're talking about a conversation among activists, among DC journalists, and other journalists, I guess. And look, there's a lot of just ordinary people on Twitter who are voters who are like, well, I'm not part of a Twitter conversation. I just see myself as a normal person in the country. And there's plenty of that

too. But I think when we're talking about Twitter, we're talking about sort of like the media political bubble and activist bubble of people who are constantly in conversation with each other. And the fact that that conversation, and Peter makes this argument, that that conversation on Twitter is different than the conversation that's happening throughout the country. By the way, across the ideological spectrum, right? It's not just an ideological thing. It is just people aren't quite as angry as they are on twitter in real life and you know and i think that candidates chasing the latest twitter dust up you know peter argues can be hazardous what do you think i think i could talk about this for days

i know probably over the course of the next two years we will but so a couple of points if you I know. and absent that you can make all kinds of terrible political mistakes related to that is that the presence of twitter increases your chance of making those mistakes and makes those mistakes cost more than they would were twitter not to exist and so you're i'm gonna be honest with you i don't care what you do if you don't have a reason for running for president other than why not you're fucked you were wasting your time and ours. You're wasting your donors money. You're wasting your staff's blood, sweat and tears. Get the fuck out of the race.

Because if you can't articulate why you're running, you can't win. Like that is the one tourism that holds even in the Trump era. Yeah. To Twitter is terrible. We tweet a lot. I'm always on Twitter. I wrote a chapter about it in my book. But it is terrible.

We tweet a lot. I'm always on Twitter. I wrote a chapter about it in my book. But it is terrible. It is a symptom of a larger problem of America in the social media areas, which is basically there is this algorithmic perversion of American politics. And the problem we have is only a fraction of Americans are on Twitter. It's like 10% or something. But 100% of political activists are on Twitter. And 100% of reporters are on Twitter.

100% of political activists are on Twitter and 100% of reporters are on Twitter. And the fact that how those – like the fact that engagement drives what people see and reinforces filter bubbles makes the cost of that so much worse. And so the – it is poisonous for campaigns. Like when we worked for Barack Obama in 2008, it would have been a lot easier for you and I and everyone else if Barack Obama had put his headquarters in Washington, D.C., like Hillary Clinton did. We lived in Washington. Almost everyone who worked on our campaign headquarters was working in Washington, and we all moved to Chicago. And there were two reasons for that. One was Barack Obama wanted to be closer to his family when he came to the headquarters. That ended up being foolish because when he was home, he went to see his family instead of coming to the campaign headquarters.

So you could put the campaign headquarters on fucking Mars and it wouldn't have mattered. Second, the goal was to be out of the Washington bubble so that we weren't being hammered all day long with Washington conventional wisdom, with reporters who were telling us why we sucked, why we were losing, why we were foolhardy. And we were totally insulated from that because Twitter didn't really exist as it does now. And I always remember, there was a point in that campaign. I might have talked about this before on the pod, but I went home. It was the fall of 2007. Barack Obama had... The poll had just come out that had us dropping in Iowa. We were down 30 points in the polls, the national

polls. And I went back home to DC for the weekend and I went to a birthday party and it was all DC people. And I showed up at that party and in my head, I've just gotten off a conference call with Plouffe and the Iowa team and Tommy's on there and they're giving me the latest Iowa numbers and how we're exceeding our goals. We've got all these volunteers and I'm like, oh, things are working. Our plan is in place. I'm operating off of data and I show up at this cocktail party and it's like a birthday party I guess and people are like, treat me like I have cancer. You doing okay? Pfeiffer, you all right? You guys ran a great race.

I'm like, we ran a great race? Fuck you. It is September. What is happening? And now, no matter where you put, and I say that story because no matter where you put your campaign headquarters, that conversation happens in your phone 24 fucking seven. Right? And it can really pervert how you see the world because Twitter is not real life.

It's not a poll. If I was running a campaign, I think I would probably try to instruct as many of my staffers as possible to not be on Twitter. Yeah, well, look. Because it distracts you from what matters. And it perverts the political coverage as well because since reporters spend so much time on Twitter and not enough time actually talking to voters, and this is not all reporters. You know, we talked to Dave Weigel on this pod a couple times. He's out there on the trail actually interviewing voters voters and there's plenty of other reporters who do that as well but the reporters who spend a lot of time on twitter because the loudest voices exist on

twitter the most strident voices they think that those voices represent you know the political dynamic of the moment and while that is the political dynamic on twitter it's not necessarily the political dynamic across the country but i think that that's an issue. And look, here's my view on Twitter. There are plenty of people with politics to the right of me. There's some people to the politics to the left of me, right? The people that I know who are actual organizers, activists who work in politics, who work in social movements, even if I disagree with them in their politics, they tend to be more reasonable. You have good conversations with them. You can have debates with them. You can argue

like because they've been in the arena or their work in the arena and they know what it takes to sort of build coalitions and get things done. I know plenty of Bernie staffers, you know, who I get along with. I know some never Trump people who worked on campaigns that I get along with. Like these people understand what it takes to sort of coalition build. Twitter has an abundance of professional opinion-havers, right? Where these people who just, like, for a living, they write opinions, they come up with things, and they have not participated in public life in any way. They have not participated in politics.

So their thought isn't necessarily that they ever need to build coalitions or to even persuade people anymore and so it is a lot of yelling and i think that has caused some of the poison uh that's on twitter because and i because i don't want to make this seem like it's an ideological thing because i know plenty of people on both sides who are out there working who you know may disagree heatedly and we get in huge fights but like you know they're somewhat reasonable the professional opinion havers or even the amateur opinion havers because basically twitter is the comment section they're really sort of making the place not so great but i will just end with a great piece of advice from hamby how he ends the piece he says politics on twitter is about making you feel bad people are shamed for going to certain schools for practicing a certain faith

for their gender their race or for using the wrong words regardless of intent. Politics at the presidential level, the successful kind, could not be more different. Winning campaigns find a way to build coalitions, to unite people with shared values under an umbrella of charisma and a succinct message that rises above the din of Washington. This is how Democrats have won the presidency in the past. presidency in the past. Maybe in the Trump moment, politics calls for a sharper edge, but the Democrats who are confident in their reasons for running and who aren't afraid of what very smart people on Twitter say about them are the ones likely to be rewarded. Every Democratic campaign should print that out, post it in their campaign headquarters, and read it every day. It's a great piece. And I think everyone who's running for president,

who's working for someone who's running for president should read the piece. Everyone who's covering someone who's running for president should read the piece. Everyone who's covering someone who's running for president should read the piece. I want to add one more thing about Twitter and reporters, which is like we have many times just been like, reporters, get off Twitter. It ruins you. And I've had – I've seen a lot of younger reporters who have argued that it is a way in which a lot of writers and other creators and journalists find ways to get jobs, right, is by showing their work on Twitter. Yeah. Because they may not have gotten, you know, the New York Times internship because they worked at the Harvard Crimson or whatever, you know, the other sort of gating institutions are to getting a professional journalist job.

And I think there's a lot to be said for that. And I think it's important to recognize. So the thing I would say about that is reporters should share their writing, their views, their journalism on Twitter. When I think you share your reporting on Twitter, I think people should just be cautious about doing their reporting on Twitter. Because that's when you're now, we've said this before, you're doing, you're essentially doing man on the street interviews on the worst, meanest street in America. And there, that is automatically going to create a funhouse mirror of what's actually happening. Yeah, that's good. Okay. When we come back, my interview with Sherrod Brown. With us today, friend of the pod, Senator Sherrod Brown from Ohio.

Senator, welcome back. Good to be back. Thanks. So I have to say, there's a lot of disappointment in our household when you announced that you wouldn't be running. But I do remember that when I was first dating Emily and she was working for you, I would sometimes ask her if she thought you'd ever run for president, because I always thought you'd make a fantastic candidate. And Emily would say she wasn't really sure that you wanted to be president because of how much you loved being a senator and how much you loved the Senate. Is that what you ultimately decided this time? Yeah, it was that. And it was also I didn't. I mean, I've known you for a while. I've known Emily a little longer. I've known others, Emily's family longer. And I I've never had this great desire to be president United States. And starting in November, we started thinking more about it. And in the end, I we started our dignity of work tour, which our goal was to inform the narrative and influence a debate with other candidates too. And I think we,

I know we were successful at doing that. And in the end, to run for president, you've got to really, really, really want to be president more than anything else. And I love the Senate and love what we're able to do here. And my work in the next year and a half is to fight for Ohio and to fight for workers nationally and to help Democrats win the Senate and win the White House. I mean, there's few things more important than those in my mind. Yeah. So you'll be in the Senate, you know, after 2020, which is a year where Democrats are hoping to flip enough seats to control the chamber. You know, it seems like at most we can end up with 50, 51, maybe 52 seats. You know, we're probably not going to get anywhere near 60.

If we have a Democratic president in a Democratic House, how do we get anything out of the Senate? Like, can you identify seven or eight Republicans who would join Democrats on sort of the major legislative initiatives that folks are talking about on the campaign trail? You know, it depends on how you win the White House and how you win these elections. And if Democrats start talking, you know, for sure, we talk to our progressive base. That's who we are. It's our values. It's civil rights. It's voting rights. It's women's rights. It's LGBT rights, LGBTQ rights. But it's also talking to workers with a progressive agenda on everything from pay to benefits to workplace safety to child care to, as Local 226, the culinary workers in Las

Vegas preach, one job should be enough. And I think if you win an election with our progressive base coupled with a real message to workers, so that workers in Zanesville, Ohio, who might not like my F from the NRA and might not like that I'm pro-choice, but they might vote for me because, and they might vote for Democrats because we have a strong message about sending their kid to Zane State Community College or fighting for child care. So both spouses can work at least part-time and do a little better economically and advance their career. So we do that right. We build a movement, even if we don't have 60 votes, and we won't, it's hard to argue we would, but you would have a number of, I think

you'd have Republicans realizing this really matters and that we've got to go in this direction. Yeah. Now, on that note, I heard you say to Chris Hayes the other day, said, I don't think our candidates are thinking of the general election. I think there's a bit of one bird flies off the telephone wire and five more birds fly off the wire. Now, you have impeccable progressive credentials, not just on economic issues, on all issues, cultural, social, everything. So when someone like you says that candidates aren't thinking about the general enough, it does worry me a little bit. What did you mean by that? Well, I'm not worried because it's really early. I just think it's important as you're a candidate.

And, you know, most of the candidates that are most of the Democratic senators running for president have not faced a general election in a state like Pennsylvania or Ohio or Florida or Virginia or states that are competitive and difficult with Republican candidates. And I just want our candidates, and I'm talking to them about this sort of one by one over time, to be thinking as they're running that they're going to be up against a Republican in the fall, not to change their views, not to, I don't buy this move to the middle stuff. I don't think you do that. But I think you talk, you think about your message in the sense of what works to a broad electorate. Think about your message in the sense of what works to a broad electorate. The reason dignity of work works as a slogan is it's not a slogan for me. It may have been in some ways a slogan, but it's who I am, it's whom I fight for, and it's how you govern. And so I think when you run a campaign, you think about the people you're talking to,

and you think about governing with those same kinds of words and rhetoric when the time comes to raise your right hand. And I just am going to ask each individual senator and others running that want to talk about it. I don't force myself on anybody on this, but I just think there's a real opportunity. And that's a message. As you know, the dignity to work doesn't just work in your wife's hometown of Cincinnati. It works in Pittsburgh. It works to a healthcare or a hospital worker in Baltimore. It works to a hotel worker in Las Vegas.

It works to a tech worker in Seattle. I mean, really, the dignity of work is important regardless of race and gender, that we respect work, that we honor work, that it pays decent wages, that the workplace is safe, that people have some power over their schedule. The more I travel in Dignity to Work, the more I saw people who have no power over their work schedule, and it makes child care more complicated or impossible. It's so lives just, it's so much harder to navigate their lives when their employer has such power over their work schedules. Those are things we ought to be talking about because people hear that. And somebody that is an NRA member and First Amendment, Second Amendment is really important to them, they may vote for somebody like me because I talk to them about their work schedules and how we can make their lives a little easier. Did anything that you heard from people on your tour surprise you?

Were there conversations that you were part of that you were hearing that aren't conversations that are happening in Washington or on Twitter? Yeah, I always learn things. I mean, my tour was really, I wasn't trying to get the largest crowds. I really did sit with small groups of people and listened. In Iowa, I listened to farmers talking about it's 15 below zero, and they were talking about what the tariffs mean to them and their soybean, potential soybean markets in the future. One of the most informing and illuminating conversations was with a woman who for 50 years has been involved in child care and ran a child care center for some time. And she said, we need to think about child care as a public good. I mean, we invest in transportation, we invest in city parks, we invest in all kinds of things as a society. But when you think about child care, many people, I hear this over and over, people wait, they put off having children

because they can't afford child care because it's so expensive or they can't find it. And on the other end, child care workers don't make a living wage. So something's wrong with the society that has been able to accomplish both, making it too expensive and then not even paying a living wage. And it really does come down to one, you know, for people, one job should be enough and it should pay a living wage. The Culinary Workers Union in Las Vegas, these are hotel workers, 60 hotel and affiliated entertainment, you know, restaurant industry, hospitality industry workers, 60,000 members of that local. Virtually everybody that carries a union card makes at least $16 or $17 an hour in jobs that don't pay anything close to that in other communities around the country. And that really is the whole construct of one job should be enough. And that's something every candidate should be able to get behind.

Obviously, we're heading into an election. What are you hoping to get done in the Senate over the next few years? And if there is a Democratic president in 2020, 2021, what do you think her, his first priority, legislative priority should be? The first thing I think they should do is to go, I don't know the answer to precisely that, but in the first week, I would say the president should go figuratively or literally to Brussels and reassure the world that we are not the policemen of the world, but we are engaged in the world as a leader and go to Paris and reenter the Paris climate change accords and go to Iran. These are foreign policy answers, and I'll get the domestic in a second, and figuratively or literally go to Iran and say we're going to work with our allies on making sure Iran doesn't get nuclear weapons. That's sort of the first things internationally I do.

I think the first thing the president does is the symbolism, but the important symbolism, because it affects 5 million workers, is to reinstitute the overtime rule that President Obama did. One of the best things President Obama did with Secretary Perez is to say to somebody making $30,000 a year that runs a night shift at a fast food restaurant that even though the management has declared them, the company has declared them management, that company can work that worker 50, 60 hours a week and pay no overtime. I'm not talking time and half, just even straight time overtime So I just want to see the new president immediately show, yes, we care a whole lot about workers, and this is what we can do unilaterally. The other thing I do is come and immediately do Medicare at 50. Medicare at 50 with the public option, with

making sure the consumer protections are in place for people that have a pre-existing condition. I think you do those, you do the one by rule and the other, go to the Congress and say, this is so important to get our health care system in place. Do you think you could pick off some Republican senators for that Medicare proposal? I can't imagine in the end that when the pressure's on that that many Republicans vote against Medicare at 50. I mean, I know the history of the Republican Party, they didn't vote for the creation of Medicare. They say they did. History shows they didn't. They mostly didn't vote for the creation of Medicare. The first time that they had a chance with the Republican House and with Newt Gingrich,

with the Republican House and Senate, they tried to privatize Medicare. Then we know what Bush did with Social Security when he had a Republican House and Senate, and Medicare was all part of that in some ways. They just fundamentally don't much like social insurance and don't much like Medicare, but we do Medicare at 50. It puts them in a place where I think we'd get enough votes to move on it. Well, Senator, we are all very grateful that you will be there in the Senate fighting the good fight. Sorry that you're not running, but I'm very, very happy that you and Connie are in public life and will be so for a long time. So thank you very much. Thank you.

We will both be engaged. Thanks so much. Take care, Senator Brown. See you, buddy. Thanks. Thanks to Sherrod Brown for joining us today, and we'll talk to you next week.