Pod Save the World - National security candidates

Episode Date: October 10, 2018

First, Tommy ticks through some major news about UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, Saudi Arabia and Brazil. Then he interviews three candidates (Jesse Colvin, Abigail Spanberger, Lauren Baer) who have different national security backgrounds that all made them decide to run for Congress this cycle. They are inspiring and brilliant. You won't want to miss it.

Welcome back to Pottae of the World. What a couple of days it has been in foreign policy. Lots of news. Most of it, not that great. So I just wanted to tick through a few of those items before we get to this week's episode, which was actually pre-recorded because there's some big important stuff happening in the world that I want to touch on briefly today and then hopefully revisit down the road. Before we get to that one quick housekeeping item, which is that I,

I'm going to be on the road for most of October, traveling around the elections and doing the POTS of America on HBO show. So please check that out if you hadn't heard about it. That would be great for us. So you are in for a treat. Ben Rhodes, who you all know and love, is going to guest host at least two episodes. I might beg him to do a third. So that will start next week.

So keep an eye out for Ben. Show will still come out at the same time, same place. But, you know, you'll get to hear from him. And that's always fun and exciting because he's. He's a hell of a smart guy. The first big announcement or development is that UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, announced today that she is going to resign at the end of the year. She is one of the few women in President Trump's cabinet. I think it's safe to say she was seen as relatively moderate.

Certainly she is more moderate than National Security Advisor John Bolton and some of the others in Trump's cabinet. So, you know, I don't know how history will judge her legacy or the work she did. My guess is that her work and her legacy will just be a small blip in what is the massive Trump show that is blotting out the sun all day. But interestingly, they're already signaling that she might come back someday in another role. And we will be watching closely to see who her replacement is because that choice will send a major signal to the United Nations about whether the U.S. is going to engage with them or continue to be a thorn in their side and constantly pick fights with our friends, with our enemies, with everybody. So that's one item. The other is out of Saudi Arabia. There's an influential Saudi journalist named Jamal Hoshoggi, who was reportedly murdered while inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he lives in exile. He was at the consulate trying to get a document

for his upcoming wedding. His fiance was literally sitting waiting in the car. He's a really influential voice. He's a leading Saudi voice who has both worked inside the government and then has tried to be a constructive writer and critic from the outside. His columns are published in the Washington Post, I highly recommend you check them out. But I mean, if this is true, and if the Saudis murdered him inside one of their own diplomatic facilities on foreign soil, it is a brazen, barbaric act that is clearly intended to stifle dissent. It's part of a broader, very troubling crackdown on Saudi critics generally, mostly in the country. And again, if it's true, you know, this is entirely the fault of the Saudi government. That's the fault of Muhammad bin Salman,

the Saudi crown prince. But, you know, the U.S. response has been pathetic. Trump could muster was, quote, I'm concerned about that. I don't like hearing about it. And hopefully that will sort itself out. Right now, nobody knows anything about it. There's some pretty bad stories about it. I do not like it. End quote. Hopefully that will sort itself out. That is not strong diplomatic language. I sure as hell hope that the private messages to the Saudis coming from the Trump White House are stronger, but we also know that Jared Kushner and President Trump and the broader foreign policy team has gone all in with its support of the Saudi crown prince Muhammad bin Salman.

And Trump's general refusal to stand up for human rights internationally and his willingness to attack the press back here in the U.S. sends a signal that there's not a cost for this kind of behavior. So this is a big, big deal that we need to keep an eye on. It could fundamentally change our relationship with the Saudi government. Finally, in Brazil, a far-right candidate named Yair Bolsonaro nearly won their presidential elections outright. He's a former army officer who has served in parliament for decades.

decades. He's pledged to crackdown on crime and corruption and weirdly talks fondly of Brazil's past as a dictatorship. He's made all kinds of racist and homophobic and misogynistic comments. He is not a good dude. We do not want him leading a major ally. There's a key runoff election on October 28th, and if he wins, it will be a major turn to the right for, you know, a key partner. So this is unnerving in and of itself for what it would mean for our relationship with Brazil, but it's also part of a broader trend of these right-wing populists who are seemingly ascendant across the world. We're seeing it in Europe. We're now seeing it in South America. So it's something we all need to keep an eye on, and I promise I'll keep talking about.

So that gets me to my interviews to this week's episode. Over the past few weeks, I have talked with several candidates who are running for Congress who have national security backgrounds. You heard a brief excerpt maybe on POTSafe America this week. One is Jesse Colvin, who's a former Army Ranger running in Maryland's first district. I also talked with Abigail Spanberger, who's a former CIA officer running in Virginia's 7th district. And then I talked with Lauren Baer, who was a former State Department official running in Florida's 18th district. I found these individuals to be so smart and so thoughtful and so empathetic about how challenging and enormous the world's problems are while still being motivated to try and solve them. And so while hearing about this situation with the Saudis or what's happening,

electorally in Brazil makes my head hurt and makes me nervous for the future. I also know that part of the solution is getting smart people like Jesse and Abigail and Lauren into the government so that they can actually work on these challenges in Congress and then wherever life takes them. So without further ado, here are the interviews and thank you as always for listening. If you like these candidates, check out their campaign websites. Check them out on Twitter and share this episode far and wide because I think once you hear from folks like Jesse and Abigail and Lauren, you'll want to hear more from them, and you'll want them representing you in Congress.

So here is former Army Ranger Jesse Colvin, who is running in Maryland's first district. Jesse, what did you do in the Army? What was your job? Tommy, thank you very much for having us. I served in the Army Rangers, and I served as an intelligence officer. I served in a Special Operations Task Force that I think officially doesn't exist, so I'm still learning how to talk about it. Okay. But Rangers in Afghanistan, our mission was to put a dent into al-Qaeda, Taliban-associated terrorist groups,

which essentially meant night missions, whether it was night raids or airstrikes. And all that is done on the back of intelligence work. So my job as an intelligence officer was to collect, disseminate, analyze, put together, essentially. we had an equivalent of warrants, target packets, to make sure that we know who we're going after. And a big part of that was leadership. I had a team of 20, 25 folks, and we're spread across multiple locations. I try to explain to folks in the campaign drill at age 27. I was making, I personally mean our team was making about 50 decisions a day with life for death consequences.

And if we got it right, nobody know about it. And if we got it wrong, we'd be on the cover of the New York Times the next day for all the wrong reasons. Yeah. I mean, that is like painstaking, high-stakes work. Were there ever moments where you thought, I can't believe we're the ones in the room making these calls right now? Only about four times a day. Okay.

I mean, I went to seven memorial services in my first deployment. Wow. I think I was 26. You grew up real fast. I mean, early on, my first deployment, my boss's boss pulled me aside in a corner, and he said, hey, Jesse, I fire the last four guys in your shoes or in your job. Then he just stopped talking. I said, all right, sir, what does that mean for me?

And he said, I don't care if you have enough time. I don't care if you have enough resources, energy. If the Afghan allies we're working with aren't up to snuff, if your best deputy is in R&R, you'll get the job done, you'll get results, or we'll fire you. So that was just the environment. So when you've worked in an environment like that, when you've made decisions at that, level. Does that make all your subsequent life decisions feel a little less daunting? Does that make running for Congress feel a little easier? I like to tell folks in the campaign trail, I think we

knew more folks in Congress for whom the hardest thing they've ever done in their life is not the campaign that got them there. I mean, I'm discovering that campaigning is so similar to deployment. My campaign manager is actually my deputy. Carlson and I serve two tours side by side in Afghanistan together in the Rangers. And when we're coming up, we're coming up. back from events late at night when it's too late to call anybody. We talk about all the similarities. I mean, something has to get done tonight. Something has to get done next month, three months from now. You can't wait until next month to get started, but it all comes down a relationship. Does it bother you or surprise you that there is still a pretty serious war going on

in Afghanistan, and it's just not part of the political debate? It's very frustrating that it is not on the front page of the news. I mean, I have every reason to tell you or tell our constituents that we should leave tomorrow. I walk around with a bracelet of a Ranger Buddy who stepped on a bomb and got killed in Afghanistan in 2010. I mean, I thought the interview you did with Ben Rhodes a couple weeks ago. I mean, if we have no reason to stay, we have no good reasons to stay. We are working with an incredibly flawed partner, and there's corruption issues, and the mission is murky. If we stay, there's no real clear objective, and it's really, it's murky while we're there.

If we leave, we know that there's going to be an attack form, whether it's from an ISIS affiliate or someone else on the homeland or one of our allies, and we're going to be right back there. I think the reality is we're going to be there for a generation, if not longer. But it is, I had a very distinct memory of working. I left the Army, and my first job was on an internal fraud team in the investment bank in New York. So we're trying to prevent the next housing crisis. But a guy I knew, not well, not my best friend, but I knew him. I spent some time with him.

I'd gotten killed in Iraq. And it was a very strange experience because I'm sitting there in an office, and that was the biggest thing happening to me in my life at that time. And for the rest of the office, it was just a Tuesday. So it's strange. Yeah. What do you think is missing generally from the current conversation in politics and the news about national security? I mean, I think we need a new generation of leadership in Congress for a number of reasons.

I think first and foremost, Washington has done a terrible job of explaining to folks back home in districts why we have troops where we do overseas. what exactly they're doing there, how much blood and treasure we can expect to spend, and how long we're going to be there, and whether we're winning or not. You know, we lost four soldiers in Niger several months ago, and we had a senator who sits on a key foreign relations committee who said publicly, he didn't even know any of a troops there. That's a really, that is a blinking red light of a broken system. You know, on the campaign trail, international affairs comes up every day,

just not in ways you might expect. I want to shock you, but nobody is asking for my take on a realist versus constructivist foreign policy. But we have a rural district. So folks, especially when I'm spending time with leaders in our ag communities, want to know about things like tariff and trade wars. The incumbent I'm running against is a member of the House of Freedom Caucus, took this trip or tried to take a trip last January with four other members of the Tea Party to Prague, to Czech Republic, to meet with.

with a political party who's publicly called for the gassing of members of the LGBTQ community, Jews, and Roma. That doesn't make a lot of sense. People want to know why their representative is doing that. I talk about on the campaign trail, and I spent my first assignment in the Army with a tripwire on the Korean Peninsula, so the first set of combat units between North and South Korea. People want to know how we can avoid a reckless war of choice on the Korean Peninsula. So it does come up, it just comes up in ways that you might not expect. Yeah, yeah.

what made you decide this was the year that you wanted to run? Why jump in now? Yeah. Part of it is I'm really frustrated. You know, there are a lot of military veterans like me running for Congress this year. You know, we volunteered for Iraq and Afghanistan, and we were sent there with no exit strategy. Many of us lost friends and colleagues. Many of us, when you come home, lose friends and colleagues of things like post-traumatic stress.

I'm a little biased in that regard because my wife runs a nonprofit to prevent military veterans suicide. But you come home and you see a Congress full of folks who are not only okay with the fray of talking ahead and screaming each other in cable news, actually benefit from it. That's part of it. The other part is I don't think it's enough to be against something. You know, my wife and I just had her first child. Our son is five months old. And I think like every soon-to-be parents, we started thinking about the world that he was going to inherit and his kids were going to inherit. And then I turned to my wife and said, we've got to do something. The politics, the vision are ripping our country apart.

And she runs this non-procate. It's especially trans-service dogs, her vet's coming back, for post-traumatic stress, military, sexual trauma. She said, I'm doing pretty good work, so you go figure it out. And I'm young, I'm 34, but I look around the country, the guy like Connor Lamb up in Pennsylvania or some of the other veterans. And I looked at their war records. They look at their business backgrounds, and I saw a lot of myself.

And so that's how I get in this thing. Do you feel like the idea of service or what service means is evolving during the Trump administration? Does it change the way you think about it? It's a great question. I talk a lot about my military service and what I learn from it on the campaign trail because I think it reveals how I'm thinking about representing folks in our district. I'm a Democrat. I'm a very proud Democrat. We happen to be endorsed by a member of the GOP who held this seat for nine terms. He's a Marine and I'm an Army rangers. So when we get a chance to spend time together, it takes about 30 minutes to figure out who's tougher because we're still arguing over it.

But his endorsement speech was about integrity and it was about service. We also haven't had the Chesapeake Bay in the way of life that is associated with Chesapeake Bay in our district. So he talked about those three things. So I hope to be part of this new wave of veterans coming to Congress who talk about things like civility and integrity, because I think it's absolutely missing in this era. And I hope to be part of a new generation that brings change. Last question for you. What's its stake for your district in this election in this midterm?

I mean, I need to tell you locally what's at stake because it's really important with opioid fatalities that are 50% higher than the national average. Wow. We have 54,000 people who rely on the Affordable Care Act. I'm running against an incumbent who is not only a physician, but is voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act over 70 times. At some point, I'm going to probably ask to cast a vote on Iran or the Iranian regime. My relationship with the Iranian regime began in Lebanon when I was a student studying abroad in Egypt. I was in Lebanon, and you see these suicide, these billboards commemorating, lionizing suicide bombers for Hezbollah. And then after college, I lived in Syria and was teaching English to Iraqi refugees.

And a week after I got there, the war between Hezbollah Israel kicked off. So I saw the full weight and might of the Iranian-Syrian-Hesbola access, you know, whether it's the form of a convoy going west to Lebanon or billboards or radio. And then I get to Afghanistan. We were serving in southern Afghanistan. The conventional units there, the Marines were losing on average about a limb and a half a day from roadside bombs. I was intelligent. I was right.

We knew we had stacks reports telling us that they were coming across the border in from Iran. And we, you know, our commander came down and we laid it out for him and said, please take off the handcuffs. Please let us go after this. these root cause because we're losing a limb and a half a day. And what he got back, and you're probably the other end of this in D.C., I mean, what was coming down from Washington was we had just lived through a very costly and bloody fight against Iranian proxy and militia's militia forces in Iraq, and there was not an appetite to do it in Afghanistan.

Strategically, it was probably the right call. Personally, it didn't make it any less frustrating because it was a very long deployment for a lot of us. So, you know, I walked away from that experience, those experiences with a deep set of feelings towards the Iranian regime. And I think that, I mean, that's the perspective I bring to being a, you know, I think one of Congress's most solemn responsibilities is international affairs. I think Congress has abdicated that role a little bit. I think one of the reasons that we need a new generation of leadership who has the background and credibility and interest in forming relationships are going to impact us. at the international stage. So I look forward to being part of that.

Man. So nice to have a conversation about an election that, like, is about shit that matters. It's actually about national security as well. I mean, it's just, it, having this 20-minute conversation with you underscores for me how absent a serious conversation about our role in the world and foreign policy is. Because the only thing we've kind of talked about is North Korea. And that's in the context of a bunch of bluster in a meeting that accomplished nothing. and actually might have hurt us long term.

We have 50 to 75,000 military veterans in our district. They're mostly from the Vietnam generation. I'd say 90% of our events. I will get collared very quietly at the end of the event. It'll be a Vietnam vet or a Vietnam Arab vet who just, they will almost always not announce themselves, but they just want to talk. 5% of it is VA policy.

The other 95% is, you know, I got, I get thanked for my service that they didn't, and they just want to talk. This is going to sound, stay with me here, but one of our constituents was the secretary of the VA under President George W. Bush, and he's backing us. When I met him, I actually met through one of our supporters who was a very ardent environmentalist, and I met, and when I spoke every ounce of truth of power, you would hope somebody in my shoes would.

I said, sir, it's an honor to meet you. I've got to tell you, I'm a proud veteran, but I joined because of living in Syria in 2006, and I could see that the war was going badly. That's why I joined. And he said, that's okay. And I said, my wife runs his nonprofit to prevent veteran suicide. It began because the VA wasn't doing his job. He said, that's okay, too. And we bonded over the deficit. He said, died of a Republican. He cannot understand how this tax bill just exploded our deficit and veterans issues. So a national security part of it is things like an Iran nuclear deal or North Korea policy, but, you know, it ultimately usually comes down to veterans and their spouses and

their families. One thing I've learned and I plan on doing is putting one of our district offices when we win inside the VA facility in our district. So when guys, men or women, our veterans, encounter frustrations with the bureaucracy in the VA, they don't have to hop on the phone or drive to Washington. They can just walk six feet to our office. That's a great idea. Yeah, and I stole that from a Republican Congressman in Florida, by the way. I mean, it does seem like the issues you're talking about cut across party lines faster than most other areas? I think this job, I mean, I'm way off the beating fast on life here. My parents, you know, I'm an Army Ranger.

My dad met my mom. This is at the University of my law school, and he had a VW van, a beard, and a ponytail. My life changed because I was 17 and 9-11, and, you know, I had the military careers in the phone that week. My parents said, no, go to college. So I studied Arabic and Middle East history, and that ended up in Syria, teaching English. I mean, I was teaching English to Iraqi refugees in Damascus, Syria in 2006. And you can imagine how they felt about the Bush administration.

But some had served as interpreters or translators for our men and women on the ground. So as much as they detested the folks in the White House, they've really held our men and women on the ground, troops and diplomats on high esteem. That had a huge impact on me. It's one of the reasons I joined the military. I really do think this job comes down to your ability to form relationships, across gaps, whether it's geographic or age or race or gender or even political affiliation. Yeah. Jesse, I really fucking need you to win. It would be great to have like smart people

in Congress who give a shit. That'd be cool. Dude, thank you so much for your time. Oh, sure. Yeah. Are you kidding me? Thank you. That's exciting. Please tell my father-in-law to get back out there and start knocking more doors. He, first stuff, you know, I think I tell you the time I talked to it. He looks like he walks out of a LLB and California. I know, I know. And I don't know where he gets his hair cut, but it's the best hair in our congressional district.

I don't know where the flow comes from. I don't know what products are involved, but he's got it. He's got it. He's got it. Oh, man. Thanks again, Jesse. Thank you very much. All right.

Talk to you soon. Here is former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger, who is running in Virginia's 7th District. So I know you were a CIA operations officer. What can you tell us about what that work was like or what it entailed? Sure. So I was the CIA operations officer, also known as a case officer. And in that role, I was working to collect the information that we sent back to Washington, to our policymakers, to the president and military members and diplomats to help inform decisions. So basically, I was one of the people who was overseas meeting with foreign nationals and collecting on information related to really specific questions that needed to be answered so that we could guide U.S. foreign nationals. policy from a position of well-informed, well-sourced intelligence. Can you talk about any of the places you served? So I was based in Europe and worked throughout Europe predominantly.

And then I ran a couple programs that were focused on specific issues in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. So when a piece of intelligence you collected got run up the chain to say the president's daily briefing, the most classified sensitive intelligence product in the world. Did you get a heads up on that? Did you guys know that, hey, the thing you got us was read by the president today? Yeah, so what the process was is we would work with our reports officers out the station, reports officers back in Washington and our analysts to make sure that we knew what were really some of the top pressing questions.

And when some analysts were working on a particular briefing that was going to go in the presidential daily brief also as a PDB, we would get. a heads up and we generally knew that that information was going to be brief to the president. And I'll say this, you know, it was actually one of the most powerful things that at that time I could say to someone, I was sitting across the table from someone, a foreign national who was, you know, oftentimes risking life or in prison or potentially worse to be able to provide valuable information to the United States government. One of the most incredible things that you could ever say to that person was, you know,

what you told me in our last meeting, it made it to the president's desk, and he appreciated it, and it helped inform the way that he's looking at, you know, X, Y, Z conversations related to that individual's country or related to whatever particular issue. And at the time, that was a really powerful thing to be able to say to someone. And it's something that I think for anyone who ever had the opportunity to say it, you know, even just once or more than that, it was a, It was a powerful moment where that person who was risking so much to make sure that the CIA could provide the valuable intelligence necessary to the U.S. government that they really saw that there was so much value in their cooperation and in their help. That's really interesting. So do you think that when you have a president of the United States like President Trump who is constantly attacking the CIA, questioning their judgments, questioning their findings, that it actually makes sources less likely to help us because they think.

think, yeah, my information will be dismissed anyway? I mean, speaking solely from opinion, I think it makes it tremendously more difficult. You know, it used to be an honor. It used to be exciting for someone to know that their information could have helped inform the way the president of the United States was engaging with his or her country or the way in our top diplomats were engaging with his or her country. And now, as we've seen, there's actually potentially risks with the president of the United States knowing a little bit too much about who that person's identity might be. And I think

that that's probably concerning. And, you know, one of the other fundamental pieces to working with working human intelligence when you're asking someone to provide information directly to you is that you have an obligation and you make a promise to keep that person safe. And, you know, so much of the training that CIA officers go through is to be able to keep their sources safe and to be able to, you know, get to a meeting safely, have a meeting safely, collect the information and write it down in a way that you can't, like, in fact, who provided it. And I think that there's probably a lot of concern among individuals now about how safe can

my information really be kept if the president doesn't believe in it the same way that, you know, prior presidents have. Yeah. You are obviously very good at gathering intelligence, getting information from people. Do you think that's a skill set that will be useful in Congress? Can you, I'll take it back a step. And, you know, at the most basic level, in order to be able to debrief someone successfully and write a really strong intelligence report, you've got to be able to listen.

You've got to know a topic frontwards and backwards. You've got to be able to ask a lot of questions, and you have to be able to really listen because people might say just half of something, and you have to be able to ask the follow-up questions in order to really truly fully dig deep into an issue. And that's the skill set that I think is important, is the way. talking about is the skill set of being able to talk about issues and then just stop talking and listening so that we can hear so that I can hear what it is that someone is saying both with their words and that next level of understanding of what is motivating them to be concerned about

a particular issue. Is it a personal experience? Is it a fear, that a concern? And how can I address that fear, that concern, or that actual issue in a way that's meaningful to that person? and how might their issues also be relevant to people across the district and perhaps across the country. Do you have a higher BS meter than your average person? Do you hear someone offer a statement think? I'm not sure about that? I think so. Do you have a lie detector with your eyes kind of trick?

No comment. Client comment. Well, I have no constituents in my district or, you know, fall into that. Oh, yeah. The constituents are great. It's the colleagues I'm worried about. Oh, I'll just fine with them. Yeah, yeah, they're not ready for you.

When you pick up the paper, watch the news, and you see the state of the conversation in politics about national security, what do you think is missing? I think what's missing is the big picture. We talk about, you know, pulling out of the Paris Accords. We talk about the JCPOA or the Iran nuclear deal. We talk about a tariff war, but we're not talking about the next piece of it, which is. is how does walking away from, you know, what's on paper is an environmental discussion signal to our allies that we may not be reliable? How does walking right from a nuclear deal that took months upon months and hundreds of

hours of diplomatic engagement to put in place? You know, it's not just about that deal. It's about the trust that we're shaking with all of our other partner countries, but then it's also, you know, countries like North Carolina. What does that signal to our adversary nations about whether or not we, can ever be trusted and whether or not it's ever worth trying to engage with us. When we look at tariffs, what does that say about our level of engagement that we are willing to be punitive with not just allies, but not just adversaries, but also with allies? And what does it say

about the fact that we're actually willing to hurt our own industry to be aggressive towards a country like China? And so I think it's the next step conversation when we're talking about funding our military, when we're talking about the cuts to the State Department. We're not having that next conversation about what does that mean long term for this stability throughout, let's say, Africa, when we're cutting aid, what does that look like in Africa? And what are the projections for what that could mean for us and our national security 10, 15 years down the road? I think, and understandably so, so many times we have the conversation in the here and now about what was this action taken and what does this action taken mean.

But in diplomacy, as I'm sure you, as I know you know, it's not just about what you're doing at that moment, it's about the years worth of trust that you've built, and it's about the years into the future that you'll need that trust. And that, I think, is the scary piece right now is it's not just erosion of trust in the moment. It's not just a bad action in the moment. It's degrading everything we've worked for, and it's changing the kind of the table setting of where we are headed into the next decade. Yeah. Why did you decide that 2018 was the year you were going to run for Congress? What made you jump into the arena now? I came down to a couple things. One is my background, CIA before that I was a federal agent. So my background's always been one of service. We, especially in both CIA and the law enforcement, we didn't talk about politics in the normal sense. I didn't know who was a Democrat. I didn't know who was a Republican. We just talked about the mission. We talked about what we needed to be doing. We talked about how we could be helping each other, how we could be either in executing a search warrant or collecting the intel that we needed. And that was it. And so there's a family.

foundational piece that I find really troubling, which is there seems to be a step away from the notion of service, and politics has become just focused on politics, and it's about this particular issue or that particular ideology. And fundamentally, we're losing the piece of the conversation, which is, well, what's best for the American people. And, you know, I think for so many of us who do have a background of service, whether it be, you know, with CIA or a lot of the military veterans, our focus was on what's best for the country, how can we achieve that goal, let's talk about all of the contingencies that it could occur and let's talk about all the risks and let's talk about all the benefits and it wasn't partisan. That's the first piece of it. The second

piece of it is I had an incredible experience as a CIA officer, but the foundation of what I was doing every single day was collecting information so that people could make good decisions. And sometimes that decision maker was me. Sometimes that decision maker was another CIA employee. Sometimes that decision-maker was the president. And the notion that we have a Congress that has moved away from the value of informed decision-making is almost offensive to me. The fact that ideology weighs out over fact and that partisan politics outweighs real commitment to decisions, informed decisions, excuse me, is concerning. And so those are the thematically the two pieces that drove me to get involved in this race because I think we need people who are committed to diving deep into

problems and understanding complicated, challenging issues. And certainly that's my background, but committed to trying to find solutions and, you know, having hard conversations and certainly sitting across the table asking someone to commit espionage is about as hard of a conversation as you can possibly have. I bet. I say bring on the conversations related to healthcare and education and infrastructure issues. You don't just tweet a lot and say I alone can fix That's not how you solve problems? No. Okay, good.

Last question for you. What's at stake for your district in this race? What are you hearing from constituents about? You know, from a values base, people in my district talk a lot about decency. And people are concerned about health care. That's the number one concern in terms of actual issues. And people talk about education and ensuring that kids can get good jobs and broadband Internet infrastructure. But sematically, as an overall value, people talk about the lack of the lack of

decency in our current political system. And people talk about the lack of civility. And in my particular case, you know, I am running against someone who is very aligned with the president, likes to talk about things in terms of the leftists, this, and the, you know, the liberal left, that, and the, you know, and it isn't productive. It isn't helpful. It doesn't respect the constituency here in the seventh district, whether they voted for him or not. So what's at stake for our district is that sense of what is right and wrong, what is polite, what is appropriate, what is actually productive. And I think that we are a Bellwether district as well, because we're that example of a district where people have just gotten set up and we're a historically Republican district. This seat hasn't been held by a Democrat since the early

70s. But people are standing up and making their voices heard and engaging in a political process, and people are showing a willingness to look past their historical political party and consider whether they might vote for me, a Democrat, even if they consider themselves a Republican, because I think people recognize that our race is an example of so many across the country where we are a pivot point where we can either accept the status quo in this hyper-partonship and this angry name-calling, or we can reject it. And we can vote for people who recognize that it won't be easy to try and find common ground, but are committed to doing that because they feel it's their duty and the mission that they will have been elected to fulfill. And so I think that is really what this election

means to our district. And I'm excited about what happens on November the 6th. Well, I am even more excited about your election after having talked with you. It's so great to have these impressive national security officials jumping into this business where we all just act stupid all the time. Thank you for this conversation. I really appreciate it. Thank you. And thank you for highlighting some of our races. And thank you for what you do to keep the conversation going as well. Thank you very, very much. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Have a great afternoon. You too. Here's Lauren there, who is a former State Department official who's running in Florida's 18th district.

Lauren, thank you for being here. First question for you. What did you do at the State Department? What is policy planning? Sure. So the policy planning staff, it's basically the internal strategy in innovation. unit for the Secretary of State. We're the folks who are supposed to look a little bit over the horizon, assess strategic risks and opportunities, advise the Secretary on how do we mitigate those risks, how do we capture those opportunities. So the place that is probably best known historically for having come up with the idea for the Marshall Plan after World War II. It was a good plan. It was a great plan. We've been trying to come up with this good a plan ever since. So policy planning just means you try to figure out what the president is going to tweet and then you do that, right? It's like

pretty simple now. That's totally what it was like during the Obama years. Just, you know, figuring out what Barack was going to tweet and how we could stay. Just get ahead of them. Stay ahead of that news. No, I mean, we were a small group of senior advisors to the Secretary of State and each of us covered a different subject area or region of the world. I worked on issues having to do with human rights and international law. So basically, I was responsible for thinking about how we spread U.S. values around the world. It's really like the probably least well-known and most influential component of the State Department, right? Exactly. It's the kind of office that everyone in Washington knows the name. And you talk about it outside of D.C. And it's very confusing as to what we

actually do. But, you know, it's a place where you are. are in incredibly close proximity to the decision makers and are often responsible for time to take the sort of divergent parts of the State Department and often the different federal agencies that deal with foreign affairs and get everyone on the right page in a way strategically that's going to make us safer and help promote democracy around the world. Yeah. Easier said than done, right? Always. So you have this big picture wide view of foreign policy when you're in government,

and when you're creating foreign policy. When you look at the horizon now, when you look at the political debate, the news, like, what do you think is missing in the conversation about national security? I mean, I think the first thing that's missing is someone who used to do strategic planning is any kind of strategy. I mean, if we look at the Trump administration's approach to foreign policy, it's basically been catching up with anything that the president happens to have tweeted at four or five o'clock in the morning on a given day. And I think if you look over the the arc of history, certainly since after World War II, we've been able to keep our country safe through strong and strategic U.S. leadership around the world, through a system of alliances

and international organizations that have enabled us to work hand in hand with other countries in promoting our values. And all of that seems to have bottomed out during this administration. Yeah. This sort of a state-specific question. How do you think we help people understand what the State Department does and make it feel cool and exciting to work there as opposed to the military or the CIA where I feel like, you know, those jobs are represented in movies besides Madam Secretary. And I want all the Madam Secretary writers room people who are yelling me for a joke Ronan Farrow made not me to know that I'm not making fun of the show. But we don't value that service the way we should, I think. I'm trying to think about how we fix that. Yeah, I mean,

what happens in the State Department is a little bit behind the curtain. It doesn't make for as exciting action movies, although there was that Tom Hanks film a few years ago. Oh, God, I'm trying to remember it. He was that negotiator on the bridge. Oh, yeah, Bridge of Spies. Bridge of Spies. Spielberg. All right, there you go. The way I explain it to people is there were very few issues that I was working on, where there weren't also decision makers from the Defense Department in the room. And they always turned to us at the State Department and said, your job is critically important because if the State Department is doing its work right, if we're out there negotiating diplomatic solutions, if we're preventing problems before they arise, or if problems

have arise, we're tamping them down before they become crises. That means fewer boots on the ground. That means we're not putting our service members at risk. That means we're saving resources. So, you know, we're kind of, I would say, the forward force, the folks who are going in and maintaining relationships with all of the countries around the world on a multitude of issues, big and small. So did that drive you crazy at all? Because when I look at the problems that we've been dealing with for a couple of decades, like Afghanistan, there's no military solution that's going to win the war in Afghanistan.

And he's a political solution. When you look at Iran, there's no great outcome to a war with Iran. There could be a great diplomatic outcome. Same with North Korea. But I don't feel like we put the State Department's role. roll forward first the way we should in these conversations? Yeah, it didn't necessarily drive me nuts when I was working there, but there's certainly just incredible misperceptions among the American public. For example, when you ask questions about

how much people think we spend on foreign aid and foreign assistance versus what we actually do. I believe people believe we spend more than 25% of our budget and we actually spend, I think it's less than two and a half percent. And the payoffs, and the payoffs. And the payoffs, of those kind of investments are huge. So I think some of it, look, is the responsibility of people who are in these roles and doing the storytelling, showing how investment in our diplomacy in foreign aid is helping to pay off. But, you know, in a certain way, those stories are very difficult to tell because a lot of times when the State Department succeeds, it succeeds by preventing a crisis. It succeeds by preventing a story from ever being on the front of

of your newspaper. And it's a lot harder to get folks to write and pay attention to something that didn't happen other than something terrible that did. Yes, that is very true. So I've worked on a bunch of campaigns and the assumption that kitchen table issues are what come up the most is true.

Even during the 2008 campaign, we talked about the Iraq War a lot because that was a big contrast point with Hillary Clinton and then John McCain, but that was really the only foreign policy issue that bubbled up all the time. When you're out meeting with voters, do they raise foreign affairs questions with you or is it skewed domestic? Oh, I mean, they do.

Certainly the kitchen table issues come up first and foremost. I mean, we're mostly talking about health care and the economy and the risk to Medicare and Social Security from the Republican tax plan. But there's not an event that I do where I'm not asked about foreign policy. And I don't think that's just because I have a State Department background. Something that I've noticed over the past year is that there's a level of fear that everyday Americans are living with that I don't think we've seen anything similar to since probably sometime during the Cold War. People ask me all of the time about how they can feel comfortable putting their kids to bed at night when we have an erratic and sometimes ill-informed president, tweeting out things in the middle of the night that can cause global crises at the same time that he's got, you know, his finger on the nuclear button. And so I've actually been amazed at how much folks in Stewart, Florida, in Port St. Lucie, and Fort Pierce are watching what's happening on the global stage and asking about it because they know that at the end of the day, if we can't keep our country,

safe. Nothing else really matters. One thing I've heard people say comes up in focus groups and polling is concern that our reputation in the world is getting harmed, that we look stupid, that we look like we're not leading anymore. Do you hear those concerns ever? I do. And the reputational issues are something that I think about a lot. So, you know, I worked on human rights issues during the Obama administration. And we spent, I think, the better part of that administration in some ways trying to rebuild our reputation as having a values-driven foreign policy after the George W. Bush years, after things like Abu Grape and the fact that we were still detaining people at Gitmo. It seemed to me that at the end of the administration,

we had gotten back to a point where we were seen as a global leader on human rights again. And I talk to folks every day who are worried that we're doing irreparable damage to our reputation around the world and that it's going to be hard to step back up into that leadership position if we ever have someone different in the Oval Office because, you know, we know we have China, we have Russia, we have other global powers ready and willing right now to step in where we are stepping back. And we know that their leadership is going to look a lot different than ours and frankly be fundamentally detrimental to U.S. interests, U.S. values, and the safety of people here at home. So why did you decide to run this cycle? Like what made you finally make that leap from

staffer to now you're on the ballot? Yeah. I mean, this is something I never imagined that I would do very much a policy girl, not a politics girl. Never, you know, never worked campaign, never wanted to really touch an election with a 10-foot poll. Shortest answer I can give, I gave birth to a daughter two weeks before Donald Trump was elected president. And I thought she was being born into one world. And it turns out she was born into a very different world than I'd imagined. And I just think, you know, every single day about my responsibility to create the kind of country, I want my daughter to live in. And then I have a mom who is one of 74,000 people in our district who stood to lose their health care.

care when our current representative, Brian Masked, my opponent, voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act last May. So I had always wondered what I would do at a time when our values, our institutions were really under threat in this country. And the answer was I couldn't just sit on the sidelines. I had to get in the arena and fight. Your state brought us some of the leading conservative intellectuals, people like Rhonda Santis and Matt Geitz. You went to Harvard University, Yale Law School. an M. Phil from the University of Oxford, I don't even know what that is. Do you think you're too smart to be in Congress, given the legacy of the Geitzes of the world? No. And look, I actually, I find it kind of disappointing that one of the things I hear frequently from constituents and frankly people on both sides of the aisle is amazement at how qualified I am to be in Congress.

You know, what kind of commentary is that on our politics that it has become so debased that the assumption that anyone who has solid qualifications and not just academic, because I mean, degrees don't qualify you alone for this, but being from the district having longstanding ties, having actual government experience, the assumption that people who have those traits wouldn't ever want to run. But I think what we're seeing around the country this year is so many people like me of a younger generation who are very, very qualified to be doing other things, deciding that we don't want to give up on our government. We don't want to give up on Congress. We are old enough to remember a time when Congress functioned better and perhaps young enough to still be idealistic enough to believe. that it can work that way again and that a new generation of leadership can take us there. Obama used to get that all the time too, which drove me fucking crazy. Editor Harville-Larie, what are you doing? Last question for you. You know, you spent most of your career in public service. How do you think the idea of service or public service is evolving

under Donald Trump? Does that worry you the trajectory? What worries me is the way that Donald Trump has demonized the hundreds of thousands of hardworking Americans who have devoted their careers to public service in a totally nonpartisan way, people who have worked under Democratic and Republican administrations alike. One of the highlights of my time at the State Department was working alongside career civil and foreign servants, people who were really smart and had such deep knowledge of their particular areas of expertise, and were willing to apply that knowledge to whomever was in office, leading our foreign policy. To see those folks be degraded, to see the term deep state be attached to the kind of people who are just working to make our country

a better place and reflective of our values is deeply troubling. to me. And I would certainly hope that if I get elected, part of what I can do is emphasize to my constituents and frankly to people all over the country, the enduring value of public service and the importance of Americans continuing to give of themselves to make this place better. Just to follow up on the deep stay question. I mean, I used to laugh at it. I think it was kind of funny. And then it gets repeated so many times by the president that there's like 35, 40 percent of the country that thinks there is a deep state. What would you say to a well-meaning person who sincerely asks you, like, is there a deep state? Should I be worried? I would say no. You got to start with

the facts on this and start with educating people on what folks actually do in the State Department, what the career of a foreign service officer looks like. And going back to first principles that you have to check out the sources for your news. And I think this is, look, part of a bigger issue that we're dealing with in our country where the idea of truth, the idea that there are facts that need to be accepted by folks, regardless of where your political opinions are, that seems to have fallen away. And I think we need to get back to the point where we can honestly have discussions about our politics and about our policy where we accept common facts. And maybe we disagree then what to do with them,

but we do fundamentally believe that there is a truth there. Because if we've moved past that, if you can believe what you believe is right, just because you get it from your favorite website, and I can believe my alternative truth based on mine, that leaves us in a position where it's really hard to see how we ever build consensus and move forward. in a way that benefits all of us. So I think we need to be moving past this.

Last, last question. Someone's listening. They like what you have to say, what could they do to help out your campaign? Well, I would say visit our website, Lauren Bear for Congress.com. That will get you connected with everything you need to know about us. You can follow us on Twitter at Lauren Bear. You can like us on Facebook at Lauren Bear for Congress. And this is a campaign that is being run by small money contributions. I've made a decision not to accept corporate PAC money. So if you're interested in contributing and helping us get across the finish line in November, you can do that on our website as well. Pony up, people.

Lauren, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much. I'm glad you're running. I've done three conversations now, and I walk out, like, so excited and inspired by the candidates. It's not about Trump. It's about great people. So thank you. Awesome.

Thank you for what you're doing. Thanks. Thank you again to Jesse, to Abigail, and to Lauren for sitting down and spending some time with me. It's nice in the middle of an election that feels like it's all about Trump to sit down with these smart and thoughtful people and talk about foreign policy challenges and their experience serving their country and how they're going to bring that experience to Congress. I mean, it's inspiring. They're exactly the kind of people we need. And if you want to support their campaigns, there's lots of time to volunteer or donate money and to help out because it really matters down the home stretch. So thank you again for listening to POTS of the World.

Share the episode far and wide if you like these folks and talk to you next week. Thank you.