#RolandMartinUnfiltered - #NABJ19 U.S. Presidential Candidates Forum

Episode Date: August 9, 2019

#NABJ19 U.S. Presidential Candidates Forum The National Association of Black Journalists U.S. Presidential Candidates Forum features candidates running for U.S. President who have accepted an invitation to participate in a special forum during the 2019 NABJ Convention & Career Fair. Candidates participating in the forum, in alphabetical order, include: · U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) · South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) · U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) · Former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld (R-MA) Moderators: Joy-Ann Reid, political analyst for MSNBC and host of "AM Joy" · Alexi McCammond, political reporter for Axios and NABJ's 2019 Emerging Journalist of the Year · Vann Newkirk, politics and policy writer for The Atlantic Subscribe to the #RolandMartin YouTube channel https://t.co/uzqJjYOukP Join the #RolandMartinUnfiltered #BringTheFunk Fan Club to support fact-based independent journalism http://ow.ly/VRyC30nKjpY Watch #RolandMartinUnfiltered daily at 6PM EST on YouTube https://t.co/uzqJjYOukP Join the Roland Martin and #RolandMartinUnfiltered mailing list http://ow.ly/LCvI30nKjuj Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. American the right to vote in federal elections. Earlier this year you made an unprecedented move. You reached out to the black press. I would like for you to explain why you did that and if elected, will the black press receive the same consideration and respect? My attitude is if y'all were covering me when nobody wanted to cover me, then you should be able to cover me when everybody wants to cover me. We need you to make sure that America's front pages and nightly newscasts and online information reflects the great diversity of our nation. On the campaign trail you called yourself a nationalist. Some people saw that as emboldening white nationalists. Now people are also saying that the president... I don'tists now people are saying what you said the press such a racist

There's some my message particularly for the young men and women here this evening Is to continue the legacy of social justice use your voice your talent and your influence to plead our cause Because if you don't question is who will? When they say the best days of journalism are behind us, please prove them wrong. When they start talking about our craft in the past tense, please remind them that whether you are on television or on the radio, whether you are a member of the pencil press, whether you're blogging or YouTubing or Twittering or whatever new thing they're going to come up with, please make sure that they understand that we are still here and we are still strong and we are still relevant. From the National Association of Black Journalists, this is the NABJ Presidential Candidates Forum,

live from South Florida. From NBC-owned television stations, please welcome NABJ President, Sarah Glover. Sarah Glover Good afternoon, NABJ. How's everybody doing? Good. Good. Well, I'm so excited that you're here. We're excited to welcome four candidates for presidential office. We will hear from Senator Cory Booker,

Senator Bernie Sanders, and also Mayor Pete Buttigieg, as well as former Governor Bill Weld. So give them a round of applause. But note that applause does not equal endorsement, right? We are all journalists here or we are public relations professionals or students and we also have guests in the audience. And so with that, we will take no further time but to get started I'm so excited to introduce our panel we have a great panel Craig Melvin a colleague of mine at NBC and NBC Alexi MacKinnon a are actually our emerging Journalist of the Year for NABJ for this year of Axios and Van Newkirk who is a reporter at The Atlantic. So with that, we will welcome our candidates

and I hope that you all continue to have a wonderful convention here in Miami. Thank you. How are we? You're quiet today. Oh, come on. We can do better than that. How are we? Good.

And a good Miami afternoon to all of you. Welcome, welcome, welcome. This week, South Florida serves as host to the nation's largest gathering of journalists of color, nearly 4,000, the largest in NABJ history. Give yourselves a hand, first of all. It is so very important that we hear from those who aspire to lead our great democracy, and that journalists, especially black journalists, are at the forefront of coverage of our communities and of our nation. Several months ago, NABJ informed all those seeking the Democratic and Republican nominations for president that we'd invite those who rank among the top six to this forum. Of those top

candidates, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker accepted and are here today. Former governor of Massachusetts, Bill Weld joins us here as well, making him the first Republican candidate for president to address journalists of color since president George W. Bush addressed this convention in 2004. Now, this entire program is being streamed live on several broadcasts and cable networks, as well as on NABJ's YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. During the program, you should feel free to share your thoughts on social media using the hashtag NABJ19.

This is a tight program, so to be respectful of the candidate's schedules we're unfortunately not going to take questions from the audience but don't worry i think we've got you covered up here on stage and with that let's begin for this millennial mayor from indiana change comes by in his words looking forward untethered from the politics of the past today he enjoys growing support in a crowded field of candidates, but will his policies, will those policies resonate with the African-American community? Let's find out right now as we welcome South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Spent the first six months of this year helping people pronounce it, and I think we're there, but most people back home still just call me Mayor Pete. I want to thank NABJ. I want to thank President Sarah Glover and the leadership team here for the opportunity to join you. I remember the first time I heard of the NABJ. It was back when I thought I was going to be a journalist. And my mentor, Chicago investigative reporter Renee Ferguson, and her late husband, now late husband, Ken Smichel, who took me into their home when my internship came through and my housing fell through, taught me a lot about the relationship between enterprising and inquiring journalism and the well-being of our communities.

I learned so much about health, about housing, about criminal justice. And even though I realized that broadcast journalism was not for me, I came away knowing the importance of the freedom of the press. And at a time like this, when the press are under daily assault, it is important, I think, for candidates, whether the coverage of us any given day is critical or supportive or somewhere in between, know that the press is never the enemy of the people. You are the defenders of the people, the chroniclers of the people, and the watchdogs of the people. And you have told the stories of our time, from a president's Byzantine business interest to the reporting that revealed the yawning chasm in care between expectant black mothers and white ones, covering another shocking instance after another of lives lost to gun violence, whether in Annapolis or South Bend, Indiana or El Paso or Dayton.

And so I am thankful for the reporting that you do with the added psychological challenge of reporting through what some people are politely and, I think, mistakenly calling a racially charged moment. Thank you for holding to account politicians and your own workplaces. And I hope to see diversity grow in our newsrooms as well as in our halls of power. I think your coverage explains why somebody like me does something like this. I'm running for president because America is running out of time. This president represents a tremendous challenge,

and we must call out his racism and his demagoguery. But I actually think that this president is not the problem because I think a president like this one is not even possible unless something is already deeply wrong in our country. And I think the story in my region and the story for my generation reflects those deeper problems. Growing up in an era of endless war and school shootings, belonging to a generation that is on track to be the first in American history to do worse economically than our parents, and living the majority of our adult lives with the consequences of climate change. These problems are only going to get worse unless we work to address them in new ways. And I don't believe there is such a thing as back to normal,

because I think we wouldn't be here if normal had worked for many Americans. So I think we need a new message, a new messenger, and a readiness to master these changes in our society before they master us. I am seeking to bring my vision shaped by my experiences as a Midwestern mayor, as a veteran, and as a member of this largest and most diverse generation yet, to tackle those challenges. Among many issues we must face, tackling these challenges means confronting the challenge of systemic racism that is one of the most destructive forces in America and always has been. As too many know too intimately, to be black in America right now is still to be in a different country. When a patient goes into a hospital and her report of pain is less likely to be believed. When a job application goes out and the same application is less likely to get a

call back, depending on the name on the application. We are by no means even halfway done dealing with systemic racism in this country and I hope over the course of this campaign you will see how I speak about these issues not only with mostly black audiences but with mostly white audiences. Because if there's anything we've learned in the last few days, systemic racism is a white problem. We've also learned the hard way that you cannot take a racist policy and replace it with a neutral one and expect things to get better on their own. Many of these inequities in our society were put in place intentionally,

which means it's going to take intention to dismantle them. That is the idea behind the Douglas Plan that I have proposed, intended to be as ambitious as the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe, but this time investing in America. In entrepreneurship, we are calling for dramatic investments in economic empowerment to triple the number of entrepreneurs from underserved areas within a decade to create over 3 million new jobs. We are seeking to massively expand access to Title I funds

and set up dedicated funds to support HBCUs and minority-serving institutions, training the doctors and the mayors and the journalists of tomorrow. We seek to create health equity zones and train medical workforces to combat racial bias, and in home ownership, enact a 21st century homestead act that will help people stay in their own neighborhoods that are rapidly gentrifying. When it comes to criminal justice, we can cut incarceration by 50 percent with no increase in crime, and I am insisting that we do so. These are just a few of the pieces of the Douglas Plan, which I contend is the most comprehensive yet offered in 2020 to tackle these issues and this will be a priority

for my White House. I hope to have children one day and I hope to be able to explain to them what we did in this moment we're living in right now and I hope that they will be puzzled that some of these conditions we're living with and and perhaps too readily accepting, were there in the first place. I want to tell them about this crazy thing called the electoral college and how our fight for a real democracy actually began in 2020. I want to tell them how we came together to build an economy where a rising tide actually did lift all boats instead of one where GDP can go up and life expectancy can go down at the same time.

I want to tell them that once upon a time, there were multiple mass shootings in a week, but then we came to our senses and summoned the courage to face gun violence, and that we beat the odds and got ahead of climate change before all was lost. I believe it is not too late, but I also believe that we're running out of time, and that's why I'm running for President. I appreciate the chance to address you, and I'm looking forward to our conversation. MS. Hi.

How are you? Thank you, Mayor Pete. Thank you, thank you. You and I got to spend some time a few months ago in the great state of South Carolina, and I want to ask you a version of a question that I asked you then. There is a chasm between your fundraising and your polling. And by that, I mean you have raised wheelbarrow loads of money, almost outraised. If my memory serves me correctly, you've outraised all but four of the other Democratic contenders so far.

But yet with black voters specifically, you're still pulling in the single digits in every state. How do you explain the chasm between the two? Well, I think we've got a lot of work to do getting our message out. When you are new on the scene, and I'm definitely that, I'm pretty sure our dogs now have more followers today than I did in January when we started this thing. And added to that you're not yourself from a community of color. And added to that you were a mayor in a city with a past and we should talk about that a little bit while we have the

chance today too. Good. People need to get to know you. And trust is a function of time and it is a function of encounter. But I believe we are on the right path toward that encounter. Last time I checked, there were only three candidates out of the parade of candidates you're seeing. There were only three who were doing better than single digits among black voters right now. And so for the other 20-some of us, there's a lot of work to do. And to earn votes from people who I think have felt more than ever a sense of being either taken for granted or let down or indeed lied to by politicians in both parties.

And we'll want to look you over every which way before you're going to be able to earn their vote. You talked about gun control in your opening remarks and the mass shootings we've seen. It's been a really difficult couple of weeks given all the mass shootings we've seen. I was reading something today that reminded me that in 2017, the FBI concluded that white supremacists killed more Americans from 2000 to 2016 than any other domestic extremist group. That is alarming.

Full stop. That's alarming. What is also alarming is how easily folks become radicalized online and embrace this violent white supremacy ideology. What is your plan to specifically address that issue of domestic terrorism and curtail this prevalence we've seen of online communities that allow folks to embrace that ideology and become violent white supremacists? So as a military intelligence officer, I specialized in counterterrorism. And one of

the things you learn very quickly is that there's international terrorism and there's domestic terrorism. And radicalization and violent extremism can happen anywhere. And when you consider the history of white supremacist terrorism that really goes back to reconstruction and arguably to the founding, this is certainly nothing new, but it's taking on new forms and it's empowered in new ways by, among other things, easy access to weapons of war. Now, this administration actually cut the funding

that was set up in the Department of Homeland Security to deal with violent extremism. We need to move in the opposite direction. And so I've proposed a billion dollars in funding for DHS to be able to stand up the right kinds of bodies that would work on violent extremism right here at home. We need to empower a lot of our agencies that specialize in counterterrorism to deal with this. And we've got to recognize that while there's certainly a lot of work to do in terms of addressing the way these things spread online, the fundamental problem is the ideology. It is the evil of white supremacy. And as long as it is being validated in some ways by the behavior and the conduct of those in the highest

office in the land. We are going to continue to see people with that ideology emboldened, empowered and I think grow even more dangerous. Now, Mayor Buttigieg, you just mentioned the deep and long history of white supremacy in this country. In your opening remarks, you said that white supremacy is a white people's problem. You also mentioned the Douglas Plan, named after Frederick Douglas, who also is part of this long history. Can you tell us more details about that plan and also how you plan to convince white folks who have been steeped in centuries of this white supremacist rhetoric to let it go, to let it pass. So the intent of the plan is to recognize that everything is connected. When you start a conversation about something like criminal justice reform, it often ends

with a discussion about economic empowerment. If we want to ask about economic empowerment, we have to also look at education. So the idea of the Douglas Plan is to deal with all of these areas and to put intention and resources into it. Think about what it would mean if we actually were able to have the federal government boost to 25% the level of business that it does with minority-owned enterprise. Think about what it would mean if we could actually deliver on funding for local communities dealing with health equity in

a way that recognizes that it's not only a function of the problems people face in the clinical environment, like when you go to a doctor's office and your report of pain is not taken seriously, but all of the social and environmental factors around that, like the relationship of redlining to food deserts and the inability to get good nutrition. So the Douglas Plan takes each of these pieces in turn. And beneath it all is the fact that our democracy is not very democratic, which is why we call for a new Voting Rights Act that tears down all of these obstacles being put up,

which again, make the entire country worse off. Because as long as we don't have the participation of every American, we're making worse decisions. And I would argue one of those is the decision that led to this president, which probably would not have happened if elections were fully free and fair, not to mention what happens with gerrymandering and the rest of it. As to the question of how this plays with white audiences, I think we need to be really clear that this whole country is endangered by white supremacy.

One way to think of it is that the one time this country was brought to its knees, which is to say the Civil War, was a consequence of white supremacy. And another way to look at it is that you can't just believe that if everything's neutral, everything gets better because harms compound. And this gets into the overlap between what we're proposing to do and the discussion about reparations, which I think needs to be taken seriously too. There's this thought still going around that says, you know, this stuff happened a long time ago.

You can't be accountable now for dealing with it. There's two problems with this. First of all, a lot of the things we're talking about are happening in the here and now. Either present-day discrimination or discrimination on the books, like in housing. There's two problems with this. First of all, a lot of the things we're talking about are happening in the here and now, either present day discrimination or discrimination on the books like in housing. Our neighborhoods became segregated largely because of federal policies passed within the living memory, within the lifetime of my parents.

But also for those things that do go deeper into our history, like slavery, we gotta realize that those harms get worse over time if they're not restored. I think of it in terms of compound interest. You save a dollar today at 5%, and just over 10 years, it's $2. In 100 years, it's more than $100. And in 150 years, that's $1,000. Why is that so important? Because if that's true for a dollar saved, then it's also true for a dollar stolen. And that means that the fact that some of this generational theft happened a long time ago

doesn't make it better, it makes it worse. The longer we allow this to go on, the more likely it is to destabilize the entire country. And while nobody suffers more from racial discrimination than those who are discriminated against, I would argue anyone who lives in this country is worse, is diminished, because we have allowed it to persist. You mentioned when we were talking earlier about white supremacy ideology and how folks feel emboldened if someone

mirrors that ideology who is in the highest office in the land. Do you think that President Trump is a white supremacist? I do. At best, he is emboldening and empowering people with that ideology. At worst? At worst, he is propelling it intentionally. I mean, I don't really, I can't see into the guy's heart. What I know is that, you know, when David Duke ran for office as a Republican, the Republican Party was horrified. They ran away from him as fast as they could. This was 20 years ago. Now we see racist tropes emanating from the White House itself and we see others welcomed at the White House or encouraged by the President and this has got to stop. And I know there's some folks out there who

say, you know, look I don't like all that stuff but I'm just in it for the economic policy. Now I think the economic policy is terrible too. But we just have to ask, at what point can you accept this kind of racism? At what point does looking past it itself become complicity? And I would say it's complicity from the get-go. So then I'm curious, sorry to jump in, whether and how racism comes up from white folks on the campaign trail when you're out talking to people. I think a lot of us in this room probably saw that video that went viral in which after a police-involved shooting, a man stood up and said, if African-American people just stopped committing crimes, essentially we would be fine. So we know that instance. Does it come up in other instances when you're campaigning and talking to people?

Do you see the evils of racism within people around the country? Look, it's usually not quite as—that guy was pretty special by the standards of campaign encounters. I mean, the truth is it's not usually that naked, but that doesn't mean it isn't there. And a lot of the awareness of racism that I've developed through the campaign has come from conversations with kids. We went to this incubator in LA, co-founded by Nipsey Hussle. It was remarkable what's going on there. They got entrepreneurs doing exactly the kind of thing that we're hoping to promote in the

Douglas Plan, which is why I was there. I wanted to kick around some of these ideas. There happened to be a group of young people from mostly the Midwest. They were young, mostly black kids and kids of color who were really good at coding, STEM, that kind of thing. So somebody had arranged for them to come to the West and see these tech companies. Really cool. And, you know, because I'm a presidential candidate, because they were there, they arranged for me to talk to these kids kind of on the fly. And the first question comes from this kid who's actually from Indiana, 14 years old, and he says, you know, there's a lot of racial tension in my school. What do you think

we can do about it? And I want to make sure I understood what he was saying. So I asked him what he meant. And he described being called racial slurs in school. And I'm thinking, this isn't, that's not racial tension, right? That's abuse. And I think there are a lot of people in polite circles, in the progressive white world, who think, and frankly, at one point earlier in my life, I did too, that that was a historical artifact. And I'm sorry that that sounds naive today,

but a lot of people really do think that that sounds naive today, but but a lot of people really do think that that's from the past and to know that it's happening to a 14 year old kid in 2019 At what would be considered a good school in a nice suburb in Indiana shows you just how much we are up against and Between that and the more coded subtle systemic things if we don't tackle this in my lifetime, I'm convinced that it stands to unravel the American project, perhaps in my lifetime. As mayor of South Bend, and you alluded to this earlier, you had a bit of a complicated relationship with the African-American community. There was the police chief that you fired as mayor there was the shooting of the Eric Logan just a couple of months ago by a white police officer those events specifically those two events how did they or have they changed how you view racial dynamics in this

country racism of course they have. I mean, the thing about being a mayor of any community is you hold inside you everything that's in that community. And so when the community is divided, that happens inside you too. In my first year, we had a terrible situation where I removed a police chief because of a federal investigation. He was well-liked. He was the first black police chief we'd ever had, which is one of the reasons why I asked him to serve

in my administration. And it was incredibly divisive in the community when I removed him. And part of what I learned was that the specifics of the case that I was concerned with that motivated me to make the choices that I made, and that I was explaining myself to the community, and we're really missing the point for why so many in the community felt like they could not trust either the police or

my administration after what happened there and it's because this isn't just about one case this isn't just about one person this is about the entire relationship of black residents to law enforcement and by extension their relationship to structures of power across our country. Now you fast forward to this year, eight years later, where we've been through a lot as a community and where I was able to earn and keep a lot of support from the black community even though they might folks might agree with me on one issue disagree on another issue but broadly had had that support but we had as you mentioned a police

involved shooting still being investigated I called for an outside investigation and that's what's happening right now and even as we wait for details we don't have to wait to know that what's at stake here is whether people can look at a police officer and feel safety rather than feel fear. And that goes beyond any individual case, and it goes beyond any individual policy. And what I and I think a lot of urban mayors are thinking about is how can we do as much as we can at home, and we've done a lot and we're doing more, and I've accepted accountability for what we haven't got done.

But also, when do mayors hit the limitations of what we can do as long as we are living in a country where these kinds of systemic inequities persist? And that's why it requires national action with serious intention. And again, conversations, not just specialty conversations for audiences of color, but a national conversation and action plan on what we're going to do so that we can finally be the generation that saw these inequities wrestle down to size. Really quickly, as a follow-up, with regards to the police chief,

if you could do it all over again, would you still have fired him? Yes. When somebody I've appointed, when I have to find out from somebody else that they're being investigated by the FBI, it changes my ability to trust them as a public safety advisor. But no, but I don't mean to be cute about it, because it was a really tough. There's several things I would have done differently.

First of all, I would have sat down. We had a complicated and awkward phone conversation. I would have just sat down and explained why I did that. After that, I never again fired somebody who reported directly to me without a conversation in person. I would have better understood why the community was not interested in what I had to say about the finer points of the Federal Wiretap Act because this wasn't what read to me as anger,

and some of this may be a cultural thing too. It is a cultural thing. Some of what read to me as anger, and just as a human being, especially a 29-year-old mayor in my first few months, makes you defensive, is actually anger that is stitched together with fear. When people were saying, you did the wrong thing, Mayor,

which makes me want to say I did the right thing, and here's all the reasons I did the right thing, what they're really saying is, I don't feel safe. And the very people I would call if I'm in danger are the people I don't feel safe around. And I came to understand that slowly and the hard way, but I came to understand that as mayor. How do you respond to criticism of your own response from the black community to the latest officer-involved shooting back home? And given the

strenuous obligations of the Office of the Presidency to respond to situations like Ferguson, are there lessons that you've learned that you would apply there? Yeah, very much so. But our responses included drawing the community into a process to learn about and shape and reform, if necessary, everything from how we do body cameras, which we introduced last year but did not serve us well this time because they weren't activated, to the makeup of the civilian board that makes decisions about officer discipline. I mean, I could walk you through all the policy stuff we're doing but the biggest criticism I heard was that it was more about people wanting to see a different kind of emotion from me and again this may be just a matter of culture in a way but at the end of the day I wanted to see you yeah and I get it but this is about ultimately is about results it's about what we can do to make people safer and and of course our response to this as a community is ongoing what a president has to do is not just implement good policies but call people

to their higher values and especially in in a post-Ferguson environment, we need to have a president who is capable of letting different parts of the country know that this is not a zero-sum game. That for example, there is nothing anti-law about demanding racial justice. It's just that the law has to actually be just or be applied in a just fashion. We should live in a world where being emphatically pro-minority and emphatically pro-police would

never come into tension, would never be things that would run against each other. But we know that it's not reading that way right now. And this can't just be fixed by a mayor or by a president. I'm not here to say that I became mayor and we solved racism or discrimination or poverty or violence in our city. What I'm here to say is that it matters whether the president cares. It matters whether the president understands how to listen it matters whether the

president has the humility of being aware unlike this one who thumped his chest and said i alone can fix it that this is the president is conducting everybody's playing the instruments the president's conducting and calling the tune and you need to have a president who has some sense of what's at stake and for those experiences that the president can't know by lived experience right I don't know what it is to be a woman I don't know what it is to be black but I am committed to empowering those who can bring that to the table and I've learned the hard way what happens when people don't feel included or empowered mayor Mayor Pete, thank you so much. Two minutes. You have two minutes to make

some closing remarks. Okay. First of all, I appreciate the chance to explore some of the toughest issues facing our country and our cities in a very honest way. And again, this is what the best journalists do. I'm not working the refs here, I'm just saying. This is what I value about what's happening right now, especially in this critical moment, where our country is at what I am convinced is a fork in the road that will determine whether the rest of this century goes well or goes poorly

for the United States of America. That we need to have the kind of critical attention and serious inquiry that journalists and journalists of color are uniquely able to provide. That what is at stake in this presidential election is, in my view, what comes next after the era we've been living through. I think for more or less from the moment I was born in the early 80s, we've been in the Reagan era. And I think it's over. I think it ended with the hostile takeover of the Republican Party by this president.

And what's next could be a really enlightened chapter in the American story, or it could be unbelievably ugly, as it is proving to be right now. And this is why I am running at a moment when this is, needless to say, a non-obvious career move for a Midwestern mayor in his 30s. But I also know why this is the only moment in the history of the republic when somebody like me, doing something like this, would get as far as we've gotten. It's an awareness that we can't recycle the same arguments, the same ideas, often the same faces, that have dominated Washington for literally as long as I've been alive. That we need to break through with something different. This is not about making America great again, because there is no honest politics that revolves around the word again. This is about deciding how to make the future better than the past.

And because the very lives of my generation depend on it, and because of everything I have learned through the good, the bad, and the ugly of guiding a low-income diverse city through a transformation in our trajectory. I am prepared to do it, and that's why I'm running for president. Thank you for your time. Thanks very much. Good to see you again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thanks very much. Thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Before we introduce our next guest, just one quick reminder here, if everyone can make sure that their cell phones are either off or on vibrate. Just one more reminder there. Our next guest captured the attention of a generation

of Americans with his unique blend of political activism, inspiring a slew of first-time voters in 2016, and the new class of congressmen and women elected in 2018. Can he maintain the momentum of the 2016 campaign, leaning farther left toward his progressive vision in such a crowded field? That's just one of the questions we'll ask this evening. We'll ask those questions to him right now as we welcome Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Thank you all for inviting me. And let me thank President Sarah Glover, Executive Director Drew Barry, and the Executive Board for all of the great and important work you are doing. This is an unprecedented moment in American history. It impacts all of America, and it especially impacts journalists. Right now, media is under assault in many respects, not least of which we have a president who is a demagogue and a pathological liar.

And who is doing something that demagogues historically have always done. And that is to undermine a free press in this country. That we have a president who calls the media an enemy of the people is literally beyond belief and something that I have never thought that I would see in my lifetime. A president who responds to criticism by claiming that the criticism is fake news. So I want to congratulate all of you for the important work you are doing in trying to make the American people aware of all that is going on around us, and that is no easy task.

As many of you know, the campaign that we are running is kind of an unprecedented campaign, which I think, in fact, is called for in an unprecedented moment in American history. Not only are we going to take on Trump's lies and his hatred and his racism and his sexism and his homophobia and his xenophobia and his religious bigotry, other than that I think he's doing a pretty good job. But the way we take him on is by doing exactly the opposite of what he is trying to do. He is trying to divide us up by the color of our skin or where we were born. And what our campaign is bringing people together, black and white and Latino, Asian American, Native American, gay and straight,

native-born immigrant, around a progressive agenda which demands that we have an economy and a government that works for all and not just the one percent. And uniquely, this campaign is prepared to tell Wall Street and the insurance companies and the drug companies and the military-industrial complex and the fossil fuel industry that they can no longer determine all that happens in this country. That instead of suppressing the vote, we are going to create a vibrant democracy and develop policies that work for all of us. Now, as many of you know, over the last number of years, I have focused on issues of income and wealth inequality, which to my mind is a very, very, very serious issue facing this country.

It is not acceptable to me that three people now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American people, all that at a time when so many of our people are working two or three jobs. Forty-nine percent of all new income goes to the top one percent. We got to talk about that issue and we got to deal with that issue. But in the midst of that massive disparity between the very, very rich and everybody else, there is another kind of disparity that exists, and that is the racial disparity in America. So today we are living in a country which, as all of you know, where white families own ten times more wealth than

black families. We are living in a country where when 87 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured the situation is far worse in the African-American community. Where maternal deaths, women giving birth, three times higher than for white women, where infant mortality is two and a half times higher, where there clearly are not enough black doctors, black nurses, black psychiatrists, social workers. So when we talk about disparity, we talk about national crises, but we understand the disparity within the African American, impacting the

African American community. And that means we have a housing crisis in America, very serious, just in Los Angeles, people sleeping out on the street. It's a housing crisis that impacts all of us. It is disproportionately impacting the African-American community. We have an education crisis in this country where hundreds of thousands of bright young kids cannot afford to go to college because of their limited incomes of their family. It is a crisis which disproportionately impacts African-American young people who 12 years after they leave school, find themselves more in debt than when they took out their student debt in the first place.

So when we have a national crisis of half of our people living paycheck to paycheck, massive income and wealth inequality, we need a bold agenda to address that crisis and that's what our campaign is about. Four years ago I talked about raising the minimum wage to a living wage, 15 bucks an hour. People said that was wild, that was extreme, couldn't be done. Since then seven states have done that and as you know several weeks ago the U.S. House of Representatives passed a 15 dollar an hour minimum wage. And when we do that, and as you know, several weeks ago, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a $15 an hour minimum wage. And when we do that, and as president, I will certainly do that, that means we address the crisis where half, half of African American workers today are making less

than $15 an hour. It will be a raise for half of African American workers. And when I talk about the need to make public colleges and universities tuition-free And when I talk about the need to make public colleges and universities tuition free, when I talk about the need to cancel student debt that impacts the entire country, it will disproportionately impact the African American community. And when I talk about, and we've made huge progress on this over the last four years, that we must understand, and the American people do understand that healthcare is a human right, not a privilege. And this is something that will impact every American. No more deductibles, no more co-payments, no more out-of-pocket expenses, no more seeing a half a million Americans every year go bankrupt for the crime of having been sick

and having a large medical bill. That will impact the entire country. It will significantly impact the African-American community. And when we talk about criminal justice, when we talk about ending a criminal justice system that is not only broken but is racist. We are talking about investing in African-American and minority communities so the kids have the education and the job training that they need so that they will not, in highly disproportionate numbers, end up in jail. Four years ago, I talked about ending the war on drugs and legalizing marijuana,

which is a major issue and I'm happy to tell you, you know, state after state is moving in that direction. This is a national issue, it is an African-American issue, because for people who smoke marijuana and it's about equally distributed between the white community and the black community, if you're black you're six times more likely to be arrested. Today in America, 20 percent of the people in jail, unbelievably, are in jail for the crime of being poor. They cannot afford cash bail. We're going to eliminate cash bail in this country. Senator.

Okay, let's do it. How are you? How are you? Thank you. I didn't mean to cut you off. You're not the first one. There are a lot of broadcast journalists in the room. We know how to hit a commercial break. Let's start with your Medicare for All plan, because one of the things I noticed at the

debate last week on another network, there seems to be, among Democrats right now, you seem to be quite divided there seem to be two camps and this may be a bit of an oversimplification but there there seem to be candidates like Bernie Sanders who believe that health care is a human right and that Medicare should be readily available to all Americans some have even said undocumented immigrants there seems to be some confusion at least there was last last week over precisely how you would pay for that can you clear that up do you mind if i stand sure or do you did you bring props should we stand with you the question is how we pay for it.

Well, the answer is we are already paying for it. Let's be clear. In my view, this is not really a debate about health care. This is a debate about profits and greed. Health care system is working fantastic if you are the pharmaceutical industry with 10 companies made 69 billion in profits when one out of five Americans cannot afford the medicine they need. System is working great if you are the insurance industry with the top five insurance

companies made 23 billion in profits last year. Over the last 20 years, the healthcare industry has spent over $4 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to give us a system in which 87 million are uninsured or underinsured, where we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs, where a half a million people go bankrupt for medical bills every year. This is not a debate about a rational healthcare system. This is a debate about whether we have the guts to take on the healthcare industry, which is enormously powerful. So how do you pay for it? We are now spending twice as much per capita on health care as do the people of any other country.

In Canada, you go to any doctor you want, you have heart surgery, you're in the hospital for a month, you come out, there is no bill. There is no bankruptcy. Health care is a human right. They spend 50% of what we spend. So the way you pay for it is that...

To be fair, Senator, the Canadian economy is much smaller than the American economy. Far fewer people in Canada than in the United States of America. So is it fair to contribute? Absolutely. Of course it is. Absolutely. I mean, that's not... You know, you can talk about Germany, you can talk about the UK. Let's be clear. We are the only country on earth that doesn't guarantee healthcare to all people as a right. What other countries do and what we have got to do is pay for this through public financing and come up with a progressive tax system that says that in a time of massive income and wealth inequality, yeah, the wealthy

and large corporations are going to pay more. And at the end of the day, according to every study that I have seen, at the end of the day, Medicare for all will cost the American people less than the current dysfunctional system. And our plan will cost the overwhelming majority of the American people less than they're paying for health care right now. Now what, okay. Thank you Just getting warmed up Should I stand up now? Yes Part of this health care discussion is also about abortion and reproductive rights and reproductive justice

This year alone we have seen several states Thanks to their Republican controlled state legislatures passing some of the most strict restrictions on abortion I've seen in my short lifetime. Why is it important for a woman to have the ability to choose whether or not to get an abortion? And if you were elected president, how would you ensure that we would have that right, as we've seen these state legislatures do what they want to do, regardless of who's in office? Well, I'll start. We could dance too.

Okay. I'm not very good at dancing. Just to be clear, as somebody who has a 100% pro-choice lifetime voting record, we do something which was controversial in the midst of controversy, and that is writing this Medicare for All bill. What we say is reproductive rights are health care. And that means that every woman in America under a Medicare for All single-payer program will have the right to have an abortion and other reproductive issues dealt with. So we cover that. Now, why is it? You know, I get very tired of the hypocrisy of some of my conservative colleagues who say, you know, we believe in small government, we believe in getting the government off your back, right? That's what they believe. Apparently,

except when it comes to a woman having the right to control her own body. So, you know, all I can say is, you know, it is your body. It is not the body of a politician in Washington or a state capital or a local government. This is a difficult decision. Women and their physicians will make different decisions. But at the end of the day, this is a decision for the women of this is a decision for the women of this country and not for politicians. Now, Senator, you mentioned

another tightly connected issue within reproductive justice in your opening remarks, which you talked about the maternal and infant mortality crisis among black folks. Now, I know Medicare for All is your platform for dealing with problems like this.

But we know from studies that this is a crisis that affects women who have insurance as well. And we also know that one of the main predictors of maternal mortality is the experience of racism, not necessarily economic injustice or lack of access to health care. What do you have planned to deal with this aspect of maternal mortality and this reproductive justice aspect? I agree with you absolutely. Look, there is no question, but when the day comes, and it will come, and I hope sooner or later, where health care is a right for all people, we are going to make a lot of progress in terms of infant mortality and maternal health. But your point is well taken. And that is on top of all of the other healthcare

crises that we face, we do face the problems of racism and we do face the problem that in African American communities, among other things, There are not enough black doctors, there are not enough black nurses or other black professionals. And that ties, so what we have got to do is focus a special attention on those distressed communities where healthcare outcomes are bad and that is exactly what we will be doing. And it's not just urban areas, it is rural areas as well. When you have a healthcare system which is not designed to make profits for insurance companies to provide quality care for all, you have the freedom to ask the question, why is infant mortality rate? Why are the maternal death rates for black women higher? And we can focus

and put resources into that. But one area that we really do have to be aggressive on is making sure that there are more African American healthcare professionals right now in underserved areas than we have. And that is exactly what we will do with Medicare for all. I want to go back to something that you mentioned. You've talked a lot about canceling student debt. Yes. In addition to free fouryear tuition at public universities and colleges, but specifically on canceling student debt. As someone who just maybe two or three years ago finished paying off his student debt, how is it fair to those who sacrificed mightily for years to pay off their student debt,

to all of a sudden decide that the government should step in and swoop in and forgive a few trillion dollars in student debt? I'm asking objectively for a friend. See, what he's angry about is we didn't come up with that idea 10 years ago, right? Well. All right. Look. Let me rephrase your question. How's that?

Sure. All right. How is it possible that the United States Congress 11 years ago provided the largest bailout in history for the crooks, and I use that word advisedly, on Wall Street who destroyed our economy? And not only a $700 billion bailout, but trillions of dollars in zero interest loans. How is it possible that under Trump, a few years ago, the Congress, needless to say against my vote, gave over a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the top 1% in large private corporations? That's what happens when people have power. Wall Street has power, the billionaire class has power. The billionaire class has power.

The 45 million people who are carrying student debt, I just talked to some young African-American kids today who are dealing with that debt. Kids who cannot get married and have kids. Kids cannot buy a home, can't even buy a car, that their whole life is being structured around the fact that they have to pay these oppressive debts every single month. So here is my view. We told this generation,

millennials, we said go out and get a college education. And many of them did, right? And you went deeply into debt, right? And that debt is oppressing every decision you make. Is that right? All right, we're doing well here. And the answer is, the answer is, it seems to me that in the richest country in the history of the world, when we give tax breaks to billionaires and bail out Wall Street, that we've got to give this generation a chance. The truth is, the millenn millennial generation for the first time in the modern history of this country will have a lower standard of living than their parents. They're carrying...

I am answering the question and that I think instead of bailing out Wall Street and giving tax breaks to billionaires we should save an entire millennial generation and give them a shot for a decent life. That's my answer. Can we also, for future reference, not scream out questions from the audience, just for future reference? So you touched the nerve there, I think. Well, no, I think you touched the nerve. I think you touched the nerve. But to be fair, how would you decide who gets the bailout?

How would you decide which college student, how much money? I mean, that's a good question, and we thought about it, and we thought the simplest, fairest, and most effective way to do it was to cancel all student debt for 45 million people. Now, you might ask, which is a fair question, it is a fair question, that program making public colleges and universities tuition free and canceling all student debt is about a $2.2 trillion cost over a 10 year period, which is a lot of money. How do we raise the money? Well, we raise the money by imposing a relatively small tax on Wall Street speculation. Wall Street last year, the top six banks made $110 billion in profits. They were bailed out by the American

people after they caused severe harm to our economy. They can afford a small tax. That tax will more than make up the cost of making all public colleges and universities tuition-free and canceling student debt. Look, I understand that not everybody here agrees with me, but at the end of the day, what I believe is when you have a massive level of income and wealth inequality, when so many people are struggling. When you've got 40 million people living in poverty while a handful of people have unbelievable wealth. Yeah, I do believe it. And the essence of what I am fighting for is to create an economy which says to those people on top, you're

all gonna have to start paying your fair share of taxes. You can't stash your profits in the Cayman Islands and in Bermuda. And we are going to create an economy that works for all of us. So people want to be critical. I got it. But that is what I believe.

Now, Senator, in your previous answer, you mentioned millennials, right? I actually believe probably about half of this room is younger than millennials. It's Gen Z now, right? A lot of y'all are. Be careful where you tread. Well, no, no. So what I want to ask is a lot of your message

is carried over from 2016 when you mentioned when you talked about we needed we needed a political revolution to achieve the goals you had for America. A lot's changed since 2019. Are there things in your analysis aside from the presidency, that have changed

to the material conditions of voters? You're being very kind, and I think what you really mean is, Bernie, you're really repetitious. You keep saying the same thing. And the answer is, yeah, that's true. And my response to that is that when we address the massive level of income and wealth inequality, when we address a corrupt political system in which a handful of billionaires can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to elect candidates to represent the wealthy and the powerful, when finally the United States joins every other major country

on earth and guarantees health care to all people, when we make public colleges and universities tuition free, when we cancel student debt, when we tackle the existential crisis of climate change, you know what? I'll stop talking about those issues. All right? But that is what we have got to do. I know media likes a new story every day. Sorry. That's not my style. And what we have got to do is focus on why things are. I want everybody to think about it. Think about it.

Ask me, how does it happen that after all of the campaigns and all of the speeches and all of the party platforms, the average American worker is not making a nickel more today than he or she did 45 years ago. How does it happen that over the last 30 years there has been the richest 1% have seen a 21% $21 trillion increase in their wealth, bottom half of America seen a decline in their wealth. How does that happen? Do we talk about it in Congress? No. Do we talk about it in the media? No. Why not? These are issues that have got to be discussed. We are the wealthiest country in the history of the world. And we do not need to have people sleeping out on the streets. We do not need to have people

spend the half of their limited incomes on housing. We do not need to have kids suffering under oppressive student debt. We do not have to see black mothers dying in childbirth at rates that are unfathomable in terms of the developed world. This is the richest country in the world. And finally, we're going to have to say, and I know this is sensitive, I know people don't like to hear it, but you've got to finally say to the people who own this country, who control our economy, who control our politics, they cannot have it all. We are going to

create an economy that works for all of us. We only have a little bit more time. I want to try to get in two very quick questions. Let's play a hypothetical game. You win the election and become president. Republicans maintain control of the Senate.

Mitch McConnell has said he will be the Grim Reaper and veto anything that comes to his desk that looks like a socialist, democratic policy. How will you get any of these things passed in Congress if Republicans still control the Senate? Good. Very brief answer, Senator. Because then we've got to get to immigration quickly. Yes, okay. We will do it the way real change has always taken place, and that is rally

millions of people in McConnell's own state of Kentucky, which happens to be a poor state, by the way, to demand that their elected officials start listening to them rather than campaign contributors. Quick question on immigration. Quick question. We've seen this humanitarian crisis at the border. What is one thing that must change to avoid that crisis moving forward? We've got to do away with these privately owned detention centers. We will not, as a nation under Bernie Sanders presidency, be ripping

tiny babies from the arms of their mothers and we will pass comprehensive immigration reform. Senator Sanders, thank you. Thank you for your comments. You have two minutes. Oh, okay. If you'd like to make some closing remarks. Look the, I know that not everybody in the room agrees with everything I say, right? But at the end of the day, what my campaign is about is asking pretty simple questions. How does it happen that in countries around the world, every major country, health care is a human right, and they spend a fraction per capita of what we spend? How does that happen? How does it happen that 10 days ago,

I took a trip to Canada with people who were dealing with diabetes and they were able to buy insulin for one-tenth of the price charged in the United States of America? How does it happen that we have a system where the Koch brothers and a handful of billionaires can spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying elections. How does it happen that we have half of our people living paycheck to paycheck? And the reality that we have got to deal with, which is an uncomfortable reality, a reality not discussed in Congress, far too rarely discussed in the media, is that you have a corporate elite in this country who could care less about the average working-class person in this country, who are consumed by greed, who are not happy enough that the top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 92%. They want more. They want more

tax breaks. They want to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and education. And what this campaign is about is, in fact, as you mentioned, is a political revolution. It's not just getting me elected. It is bringing millions of people to stand up and fight for change in the only way that change has ever taken place, whether it is the labor movement, the women's movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement. Those changes never took place from the top on down, always from the bottom on up when millions of people stood up and fought for economic justice, racial justice, social justice, and that's what this campaign is about. Thank you all very much. Senator Bernie Sanders, thank you. Thank you, Senator. Senator, don't forget you.

A quick reminder here, we have two more candidates we would ask for all of you to try and remain seated and not leave and be respectful two more additional presidential candidates here senator Sanders thank you Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ahead of last week's debate, our next guest referred to himself as a quote, David walking onto a field having to fight Goliath. And anyone who saw him on the debate stage in Detroit realized that the former Newark, New Jersey, mayor, Rhodes Scholar, and Stanford All-American athlete, he's got a little fight still in him. Please welcome New Jersey Senator Cory Booker.

CORY BOOKER How's everybody doing today? I want to thank the National Association of Black Journalists for inviting me here and really want to focus on those folks who are in this room right now. I want to celebrate you. I don't need to tell everybody here that you are part of a tradition in America, black journalism that's shaped the course of history. None of us, in fact, would be here right now if it wasn't for people who focused on journalism, black journalism, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, so many others who broke down barriers,

told the truth, and opened doors, not just for black journalists, but open doors for the black community. Throughout our history, in so many ways, members of the black press have been leaders of all African Americans, and indeed leaders of all Americans. They're leaders that told the stories that had to be heard, who told the truth that needed to be told. Just yesterday I was speaking at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. This faith community has a long tradition. One of the early leaders of the congregation was a man named Richard Cain who became the pastor of that church after the Civil War and after the congregation had been meeting for decades in secret because black churches were outlawed in South Carolina.

As a leader of Mother Emanuel, Cain was a leader in the community, and more importantly, and not accidentally, he was a proud member of the press. He published the first black newspaper in South Carolina during Reconstruction, before becoming the first black clergyman ever to go to Congress. In so many ways the history of the church that I was in yesterday is not just a story of one congregation, it's the story of our country and the importance of truth-telling. Because when a white supremacist entered that church and killed nine people, he wasn't simply targeting individuals. He was targeting the heart of our community. Like church burners and bombers in decades past, he was attacking the black church where for generations people have gathered in faith and worship for social strength and community nourishing,

for activism and the cause of social justice, the inclusive ideas of our highest of civic virtues. But you know, black folks also came to church because they gathered there for news and information. And we know this throughout our history from the Negro spiritual to Black media today. We have found ways to communicate truth, to compel justice, to have a more inclusive democracy. The truth of who we are, who we have been, and who we can be can be seen through the traditions under which you gather here right now. So I want to take a moment to talk very plainly about white supremacy.

The truth is that white supremacy has always been a problem in our American story. Do not let the Disneyland version of our history be the one that's paramount. It has always been there, lurking, if not on the surface, beneath it. The racist violence that we saw this past week has always been a part of the American story, no times more than when we see rapid social change happening, which is why at this moral moment in America, now more than ever, we need your voices. I know I'm running for president, but I'm actually here today to talk to you about your voice. From Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man to Langston Hughes asking what happens when a dream deferred, great poets and storytellers have always pointed to the

agonizing crisis that comes when stories aren't told, when the truth is not told, when the light is not focused on the totality of who we are as a people. I'm the only United States senator that lives in a low-income black and brown community that isn't the site of overt recent attacks of white supremacy, but the city I live in was forged in the fires of bias and bigotry, systematic discrimination from redlining to mass incarceration to painful environmental justices, environmental racism. But the stories of communities like mine are often not told. They're often covered up.

They're not part of the persistent American consciousness that we see in our media. And as black journalists, you understand that the press has an obligation. It's not just to call out the obvious hatred and bigotry we see coming out of everywhere, including the Oval Office, but to go deeper and to reveal more. The act of an anti-Latino, anti-immigrant hatred that we witnessed this past week didn't start with the hand that pulled the trigger. It did not begin when a single white supremacist got in his car to travel 10 hours to kill as many human beings as it could. It was planted in fertile soil because the contradictions that have shadowed this country since its founding remain who we are. And so I want to make it clear, our work is not complete just by calling out the shortcomings of our leaders. The path forward for our country and what we must do in the wake of

another tragedy cannot be reduced to the impotent simplicity of just discussing or debating who is a racist and who is not. Because if the answer to the question, do racism and white supremacy exist, is yes, then the real question isn't who is or isn't a racist, but who is and isn't doing something about it, about racism. Have we perpetuated the problem ourselves through a lack of fair examination of racism in America, a lack of truth-telling, a lack of action? We all have a responsibility, and yes, you have a responsibility. What are we doing to address the legacy of white supremacy and the way it has manifested itself so profoundly in our society, yet we don't seem to be focusing on it? Mass incarceration, where there's no difference

between blacks and whites for the use of drugs or the selling of drugs, but blacks are almost four times more likely to be arrested. We have come to the distraught present that right now in America, there's more black folk under criminal supervision than all the slaves in 1865. What are we doing to address a system that for decades

before the opioid crisis, in communities like the one I live in, was dealing with addiction and mental illness by prison and jail, not by health care and treatment? What are we doing about gun violence and the epidemic that is in our country where black Americans make up 50% more than 50% of the homicide victims what are we doing about a climate that not only allows the dehumanization of certain people so much that not only are you throwing children in cages at the border all across America children are being put into solitary confinement that other countries and our psychological professionals call torture, but it is a regular practice in America. These are the questions that we have to ask. These are the questions that demand journalists

to focus on. As storytellers, you all know that there is another story we could be telling about our country, a better story, not one that ignores or mistakes or accommodates our failures, but one that seeks the hard answers, one that genuinely seeks the answers, asks the kind of question that our ancestors did in journalism, that pricks the moral imagination of a country, calls to account the conscience of our country. This is the work that you all do. So many of you that I know and I've met are asking these kind of questions, but we need this even more now, especially at a time that the President of the United States is calling you all the enemy of the people, which in and of itself makes your lives more at risk. And I know I'm going to be close here, but I promise you, I'm going to sit down and I won't R. Kelly you at all. I won't stand up.

I do want to finish up. I'm glad you clarified that. I'm glad you clarified that. I was referencing my Gayle King days. Come on. I want to finish. I want to finish with this. I want to finish with this. If I may finish. If I may finish. You only have three presidential candidates here today. We're all running around this country, but I wanted to come here today to have a conversation

with folks that I think are really urgently needed. I know I'm going to get a lot of questions about me right now, but I really came here to talk to black journalists. Because what this election is often centering on is what one man said in the White House or what the polling numbers are, the questions I've seen asked and other things. But you all have a role in this country to talk about the issues that when I'm hanging out in the barbershop or I'm walking through streets that people feel aren't being focused on or aren't being talked about. That's really what we have to do. And that's what I hope we sit down and talk about now.

Thank you. Thank you about now. Thank you. Thank you, Senator. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I didn't get the clarification. You didn't get the clarification? I just want to say that my favorite black journalist is Gayle King because she showed

some composure. That's how you're going to start this? She showed some composure. That's how you're going to start this? We invite you over to sit. No. I love Gayle as well. We've got some fighters. Are you saying Gail King is not worthy of that?

No, no, no, I love Gail Make sure you tweet that I'll talk about you Despite being a fighter, having some fight in you You run a pretty positive campaign Centered around love and uniting the country We hear that a lot from a lot of folks The country is divided, we need to unite it

But I'm confused and I think Some folks in this room and around the country might be confused about what that actually looks like. What does that look like in practice? Describe to us what a united country would look like under a President Booker. Well, again, we haven't yet fully achieved the beloved community in America. At times, we've seen the best of America through our multiracial, multiethnic coalitions that actually have been the times we've made major advancements. The civil rights movement was a multiracial, multiethnic coalition, blacks, whites, Christian Jews, and an array of our country coming together to accomplish

something, even the suffrage movement. I mean, Frederick Douglass's last meeting he went to before he died was a suffrage movement. It was an encompassing, inclusive, democratic movement for justice. The labor movement was as well. We're mired in this moment in American history now where we're so divided against ourselves that we can't do the things that even past generations did, like have a massive investment in infrastructure. The busiest rail corridor in the United States of America runs from Boston to Washington, D.C.

It's called the Northeast Corridor. China recently has built 18,000 miles of high-speed rail, and our busiest rail corridor moves half an hour slower than it did in the 1960s. So we are becoming so divided in our nation, falling into deeper levels of tribalism, that even on the issues we agree on, like common-sense gun safety, we're not getting done.

And so I'm running this race, and please don't mistake. People often think that somehow strength means you have to be mean. Sometimes the toughness means you have to be cruel. I'm running what I think is a campaign about love that is the kind of love that stood up before Bull Connor. Now, they didn't bring fire hoses and bigger dogs to fight Bull Connor, but they brought love. That's what inspires my life.

And I don't think you can campaign wrong and think you can govern right. And so what I'm trying to do, the reason I'm running, below all the policy issues that are important to me, the reason I'm running is because I think we need a revival of civic grace in our country. I think we need a more courageous empathy, like I was trying to talk in my opening remarks, that gets us to see each other. Not just see each other and not just even understand the injustices that our fellow Americans are facing, but that activates the engagement of us to understand that we share a common destiny,

that your injustice undermines my sense of justice and experience with justice. And so I'm trying to campaign that way because I'm going to govern that way. And the only way this nation is going to be able to get big things done is not if we just triangulate ourselves as a Democratic Party into the White House. I think our mission shouldn't be to simply beat Republicans. I'm running because I think the mission of my party needs to be about uniting Americans towards a broader cause of justice and to new American majorities. Now, Senator, you, I believe, correctly identified the consequences of white supremacy, of these centuries of

injustice, especially in your home community and especially in the African American community there. I don't know exactly how to phrase this delicately, but is it not your current and former job to deal with that? And if that's still ongoing, what do we have to hold on to that can bring us faith that you can change it as president? So this is actually, I think, one of the best questions I've ever gotten sitting down. So you just moved up right below Gayle King. It's almost like she paid you.

Is she contributing to the campaign? No, she's not. No, she's not. So look, this is one of the best questions because all of a sudden it's presidential time and everybody's coming out with their plans to deal with white supremacy or to deal with racism and to deal with these issues. I think that when I hire people, when I ran a city, one of the best ways I learned to ask questions was not what you're going to do when you get this position I'm you for, it's what you've been doing about these issues or how have you faced similar circumstances in the past. And so my work, life work, has been trying to address issues or the manifestation of serious bias. You know, I graduated from law school. The first thing I did was move into the community I live in now, which is a low income. I mean, back in 2010, the census said my neighborhood was about $14,000 per household, concentrated African-American community below the poverty line that was facing experiencing

injustice. And we made dramatic change. We're now the number one school system in America for beat the odds schools, high poverty, high performance, because every child has worth and every child has endless potential. And we've started to show that in Newark, New Jersey. But it's more than that. I came into the Senate and I still remember the first day I worked late. And this is what we should be looking at at every one of the major news outlets. I walked into the United States Senate one day. I was working late. First thing I was thinking when I first got there was there's not that much diversity in the United States Senate and the Senate committees, on

Senate staffs, and then the first day I work late I go to leave and there's a line of workers coming in at night to do the work at night and it's mostly black and Latina. And this is where I give a lot of credit to Brian Schatz, the senator from Hawaii who became my partner in this effort, is we're going to talk to the world about diversity and inclusion, and the Senate doesn't have, I couldn't find an African-American person on the United States Senate Judiciary Committee. And so Schumer agreed, and we changed the rules for Democratic senators, put the Rooney rule in place, but even more so, we forced them,

now every senator has to publish for the public to see their statistics. How many African Americans, how many women, how many minorities do you have on your staff? And guess what's happened to the number of people being hired that are in the room now when it happens? It's gone up. And so for me, you're asking me how I've addressed these issues from being the mayor of a city for about two terms and having shown unequivocally dramatic change from food deserts to reforms to our court systems to education to health care, showing that we can, there are actually ways to make a difference. I tell Americans all the time, there's not a problem that is in this country that's bigger than our capacity to solve it, the issue we have is not can we, it's to marshal our collective will. And I feel

like the pattern of my life choices since I was in my 20s has been about addressing these issues and showing progress, including the first major bill to start to unravel mass incarceration in our country that has led already to the liberation of thousands of Americans from jail, which was the first step act that I helped lead through the United States Senate. So this is, in many ways, my life purpose, which is to address persistent injustice, especially those Americans that are too often left out of the equation, left aside, looked down upon. I know we can be a more inclusive America. I know we have that capacity, What we need leaders to do what I asked the journalists in this room to do that are really focused about capturing our moral imagination again that is

ultimately essential if we're gonna motivate the kind of change that we need. I know how much you like fundraising and polling questions so I'm gonna ask you a polling question. You're the only black man in the race for the Democratic nomination. Every major poll so far has shown Joe Biden polling fairly well with African-American voters specifically. How can it be that in 2019 in the Democratic Party, a white man in his mid-70s is polling better than all of the other minorities in the race with African-American voters? Yeah, look, I get this ask from sophisticated journalists all the time, and I look at them and I'm like, I'm like, wait a minute. You and I both know

that if the polls this far out were predictive, Jimmy Carter wouldn't be president, Bill Clinton would have been president, Barack Obama wouldn't be president. In fact, the polls this far out have never predicted who the president is going to be. In fact, I'd be worried right now if I was polling ahead. Because the only people this far out that were polling ahead that ended up getting our nomination ultimately didn't become president. Now, they won the popular vote. Gore, Clinton, Mondale did not. But those were the three people that polled ahead consistently the whole time. The folks that went on to become president were people where the polls were not predicted.

It sounds like you're saying it's just a matter of time before Cory Booker catches on. I'm not saying that. I think that Mike Tyson had it right when he simply said that everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face. Now, I think he said until I punched him in the face, but I'm not punching anybody. What I mean is every pundit and prognosticator had the last election wrong. I can't tell you what's going to happen. I've never seen a campaign that has 24 people in it. I'm not running for the polls. I'm running because I have something to say. I'm running because I'm bringing a message to this country that if I felt that one

of the other 29,000 people running or saying that I wouldn't run. I think we have a crisis in this country where people are beginning to believe that the lines that divide us are stronger than the ties that bind us. I think that we see forces to begin to rip this country apart where we can't even fix stuff like our infrastructure. We're no longer investing in stuff like the future of our children. Even the things we used to distinguish us in humanity, we were the innovators, the people that landed on the moon, the people that developed the supercomputer. We're now no longer even the number one research and development intensive economy there is. And I see things that are awful,

life expectancy going down through deaths of despair. And this idea that we're going to somehow solve these problems by vilifying each other or tearing each other down belies American history. The times we get things done, it's not when we blink in the eyes of being hard on injustices, but when we find leaders who can pull us together and help us understand that we have common cause and common purpose. And so yeah, I don't know what the outcome of this is gonna be. I know what the polls have predicted before and how they were always wrong, but God, you don't get into a race because of the poll you take. If

that was the case, you and I both know I would have never been the mayor of Newark, New Jersey. I would have never won my city council seat. I ran for those offices because of a driving purpose to heal, to bring communities together, to do things that people said couldn't be done. We did impossible things in Newark that people said couldn't be done. We passed some legislation in the Senate, but when I got there, Democrats told me that in the time of Willie Horton, you couldn't pass legislation that liberated black men from prison. And hell, just the crack cocaine, powder cocaine disparity making that retroactive, 90% of the people released are African Americans. And so I know what we can do, and I'm running because I believe in America. At this point especially, we desperately need a leader that's going to put more

indivisible back into this one nation under God. You've got great message discipline. I'll say that. I want to go back to an anecdote. That's a cynical reporter thing to say. You do. Alexi spends a lot of time covering you guys. I want to go back to an anecdote you were talking about with Brian Schatz, the senator from Hawaii, Chuck Schumer. It's frustrating to be the person of color calling these things out. It's also interesting to hear how optimistic you are when I talk to voters around the country who voted for Obama twice and then took a chance on Trump and will say things like, I'm not racist. Those are just the facts about any number of things. I have faith in humanity to an extent. I know not everyone is racist, but there are a lot of racist folks out there.

And I think that is incredibly difficult to change unless you educate a lot of people on the ills of racism, how it manifests and how to stop being racist. There's two big points you're bringing up here. If I can, if I can break them down, at least in how I look at them. One is, you don't live where I live, where I see the wretchedness of reality without understanding what really hope means. My tenant president, the projects I lived in, Miss Virginia Jones, her son was murdered in the lobby of the building that I would move into, but yet she never left. And you would call that optimism.

I think optimism is just Pollyanna. She'd get up no matter what's happening. No, hope stares the wretchedness and the pain and the despair in the eye and still chooses hope anyway. And you feel like people are craving hope. I don't believe that. I go around this country now. I see in northern New Hampshire, I see a couple driving down from Maine hours in the freeze. I still remember that day. It was freezing cold just to come to see me. Their daughter was murdered.

But they're coming to see me on the hope that we can do something about this. And the second big thing besides the definition of hope, because anybody that just tells you, oh, we're going to sunshine and rainbows, we're going to get there. There's no way to get there with that kind of attitude. If you can't confront the truth, then you can never have the reconciliation our country needs. So hope to me is staring at despair, calling it out and still saying that despair will not have the last word. But the second thing I hear about all the time, and again, I'm challenging media people, folks, is this whole thing about electability. Like, I really sometimes sit there and look at my TV,

and I have to reach for my two best friends, Ben and Jerry, because they're all driving me to eat. And I hear all of these things, like, oh, well, you know, the people who voted for Obama and then voted for Trump and all of that. You want to know what electability is? 2008, I go to vote in Newark, New Jersey for, I miss Obama. I miss her husband too. And I'm team Michelle. There's a line around my polling space. It's a black community. I go up to the end of my line. I'm mayor of the city.

I got police officers next to me. We're brick city, you know, and we keep it real. And the woman looks at me at the end of the line, not, hi, mayor, how are you doing? She looks at me and says, don't you think you're cutting in this line now? I don't care who you are. You ain't special. And I look at her, I'm the mayor of the city. I look at the woman, I go, yes, ma'am.

One year later, it's a gubernatorial election in my state. Incumbent John Corzine against Chris Christie Republican. I go to vote, nobody is there. I walk in and hug the poll worker that's working there because she looked lonely. And then it ends, and Chris Christie won that election very narrowly. Now, why? What's the electability issue there? Was it the people we often talk about that, or you call out the white racist or the people that?

No, it's in communities like Newark. I'm not putting the blame on us, but I'm saying we had the power in our hands. If Newark and Camden perhaps came out and voted near the year before, and so what? We're having a conversation about Michigan, and we're not having the direct talk, which is if African-American voters had turned out Michigan at the same levels that they did four years before, she would have won Michigan. Same thing with Pennsylvania. Same thing with Wisconsin. The leader that we need in our country is a leader that can inspire people. And I'm sorry, yes, there are racists in our country, but they can't win if we don't actualize our power.

That's why King said something more eloquent than I could ever say. He said in his era, he said what we have to repent for is not just the vitriolic words and violent actions of the bad people, it's the appalling silence and inaction of the good people. And so we need a leader that can ignite and energize our party. And if we have one that can't, if we have a leader that people are just voting for because it seems like the safe choice, that it's not creating a movement election, then we could likely tend to have the same result that we had four years ago. And I'm not blaming Secretary Clinton because she ran an excellent campaign but I will

tell you this right now right now this is something you should think about who is being targeted for voter suppression by the Russians who is being targeted for voter suppression by Republicans certain Republicans it is the african-american community and that's because they understand that if you by Republicans, certain Republicans. It is the African-American community. And that's because they understand that if you suppress that community, you can ensure that you win elections. I want to make sure we give you some time

for closing remarks. Two minutes, you're on the clock. I'm not going to tell you what to say, but I would love an explanation on your 2012 tweets about coffee and sleep. If you can incorporate that into your two minutes. I don't think you can incorporate that into your two minutes. You mentioned Ben and Jerry. Two minutes.

I don't think I can do that in the back, but I just want to say it is an honor to sit here before you. I'm not, running for president gives you this incredible moment

where people, more people want to come and hear what you have to say. But I'm not going to miss the moment of telling folks what they need to hear, want to hear. I think that we all, especially journalists, do our best when we make people uncomfortable, where we comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. And this really is one of those moments in America where the story that is being told is inadequate to deal with the injustices of this moment. It's inadequate because even in this presidential election, what seems to be dominating the news

is the outrage of the moment. I had a friend told me that his producer literally stopped him from talking about certain things because it wasn't enough conflict. It wasn't enough us versus them. We need a new American story. And fundamental to the freedoms of this society is the media. And I worry sometimes where corporate needs and demands are undermining what the culture needs, a culture that now seems to mistake celebrity for significance, popularity for purpose, wealth for worth. The fierce power of the black media in the past is we didn't have that much money but we were telling truths that America needed to hear. And so I'm not forgetting where I came from and I'm gonna do my best in this political campaign to talk about issues that I hope get to the stage but my my purpose

for being here is to say thank you to folks here who are really working in this time to make a more inclusive a more democratic a more honest nation at a time that we all have to remember the old proverbial words of our ancestors. Let's tell the truth because the truth will set you free. Senator Booker. Thank you. Again a quick reminder here to all of our guests, the journalists who have gathered in this room. It sure would be nice if there was not a mass exodus. Our next guest.

We have one more candidate coming. Our next guest is the former governor of Massachusetts. He's also the sole challenger to President Donald Trump for the Republican Party nomination. To him, it's not just a political fight. He has said it is also a moral fight, as he's expressed frustration that the party of Lincoln has become universally viewed as the party of racism.

His words. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming former Governor Bill Weld. Thank you very much, everybody, and my thanks to the NABJ and President Glover, and everyone's been so kind to welcoming us here today. I built my career on prosecuting political corruption cases in particular, first in Massachusetts and then for the entire nation in Washington. And in that capacity, I was kind of trying to tear down temple walls of the existing power structure, in order to be able to penetrate public corruption. And in that context, I always thought the press, who's also trying to tear down the temple walls, it's not just picking fleas off a dog, it's tearing down

the temple walls. They were my most natural strategic ally. And I hope I've comported myself in that throughout my career. So I'm honored to be here among you journalists. The president, as has been mentioned, has said that a free press is the enemy of the people. It's a standard despot's maneuver to try to drive a wedge between the press who can stop him and the people. And when I hear that, I just say, aha, it's more like an enemy of a corrupt politician. And I proved that over 100 times. I had convictions in 110 out of 111 political corruption cases that I brought in my career as U.S. attorney.

I'm running for president because much needs to be done in this country at this hour. It's not all going to be easy, but as Dr. King said, the time is always right to do what is right. In the area of education, for example, we need equal funding for inner-city schools. I've lived this. We need school choice and charter schools so that parents will have options that they

now don't have. In the criminal justice area, Senator Booker has a wonderful bill dealing with the problem of incarceration, those mass incarcerations of predominantly African Americans for possessory narcotics offenses, thousands of people in jail who should not be. As a former criminal justice guy, I can tell you that if you're black, you're four times as likely to get arrested for possession of marijuana as if you're white. You're four times as likely to get a jail sentence. If you get a jail sentence, it's likely to be four times as long. You do the math. That's a 64 to 1 ratio.

That's completely unacceptable in our prison population. As someone mentioned, I think Senator Sanders and I was going to say it anyway, we've got to get away from the cash bail system and the system of bail bondsmen in this country. The bail bondsmen don't even carry any risk anymore. The law has changed since their heyday 40 years ago, and they're still making people rot in jail before their case is called to trial. Again in the criminal area, we have to prosecute the flagrant cases of voter suppression that goes on, particularly in the southern states.

Georgia and one other state come to mind. One of them is so bad that the Republican who was running in the election said, yeah, you're right, this is so bad we've got to redo the election. So the first step legislation was only a first step. There's a lot more to do there on the criminal side. In the economic area, this is not often referred to, but occupational licensing is a tool used by entrenched bureaucracies in various professions to keep – it's a monopolistic way of keeping newcomers, which is disproportionately African Americans trying to break in from being able to come into that

profession. In the fiscal area, probably the first thing I would turn my attention to, we've got to end the trillion-dollar deficits. It's going to be an unbearable burden, if not stopped, for the millennial generations and those coming after them. And it's none of their doing. They're not doing it. The same is true in the environmental area.

We got to cut our carbon emissions to avoid a disastrous climate change in our country, which again is going to be a whirlwind reaped by the millennial generation and those younger than they. And it's just raises a fundamental question of fairness here. In the international area, which is a particular interest of mine, I've spent most of the last 10, 12, 15 years in international business going around the world, predominantly Asia and Africa, but all over the world, Middle East, seen a with our allies, which seems to be Mr. Trump's first priority in the international area. And he reserves his charm offensives for the most brutal dictators in the world.

We've got to get back to free trade, which always benefits the United States, because we have the highest productivity per worker of any country in the world by a mile, including China. So we're always going to get the high-wage jobs from free trade with other countries. It's an enormous, enormous benefit to the United States. In terms of income inequality, you know, talk about an idea whose time has come and come again and is now really here in our face. We have to lighten the relative tax burden on the poor.

We have to make sure that the door to the middle class is not slammed in the face of the working poor. I say this not only as a moral matter, it's obvious, but also as a prudential matter. If people say the bottom 15, 20 percent of the economic ladder don't feel that they have a fair shake, that is going to feed social unrest and get people's teeth on edge, which of course is something only one person in the country really seems to want, and that's the President of the United States who wants to feed and kindle resentment and having everybody's teeth on edge. Finally in terms of economics and fairness we need to understand, we need to harness, and we need to distribute fairly the inconceivable amount of aggregate wealth that's going to

be created by artificial intelligence, robotics, and machine learning. Right now, we're thinking they're the villains. They're going to take away a lot of our jobs. But we just need to make sure that the workers who are displaced by those trends receive the technical education they need to obtain technical skills to get the replacement jobs that are going to be higher wage, higher paying jobs than the jobs that are lost. And funding that, I can tell you, I may not be any Bernie Sanders, but I've presided over budgets and I know that to govern is to choose and to have priorities. And the cost of funding that and making sure that all those displaced workers made out better than

they started would be child's play as a matter of fiscal policy and government. Governor, we'd love for you to have a seat and take a few questions. Yes, absolutely. Governor Bill Welk. You mentioned something during your remarks there. You talked about deficits and the national debt, and I think most folks in this room know that the national debt deficits have never been higher in this country. There was a time when Republicans made that one of their mantras,

small government, low taxes, low debts, low deficits. What happened? I think everybody got fat, dumb, and happy in Washington, D.C. And, you know, my motto has always been in politics that there's no such thing, really, as government money. There's only taxpayers' money. Well, the folks in Washington long since forgot the taxpayer, the American taxpayer. They get together every year, the Dems and the Rs, and they say, we got to – the Dems want to raise the budget 5 percent for social programs, the Rs want to raise it 5 percent for military. So they finally get together

and they raise it 10 percent 10 that's the compromise on everything and only in washington dc is a five percent increase in spending called a cut now earlier you mentioned voter suppression especially in the south now i'm a southerner i'm a carolinian i'm from north carolina where a lot of this has been going on. And one of the things that Republican consultants over and over again, they tell me, they told me on the record, off the record, in years of reporting is this is how we win. Is it even in the Republican Party or Republican presidential candidates best interest to sort of openly disavow voter suppression?

I mean, there was a very prominent Republican consultant in the state of New Jersey, not even a southern state, who boasted in 1993 that my mission was to go into the black churches and pass around little walking around money and suppress the black vote. I couldn't believe my ears. This is highly illegal. We have statutes, civil rights statutes, to prevent this sort of thing. And, you know, you just got to have the political will to do it. I'll give you an example from the police brutality area. Nothing to do with voting, but it has to do with civil

rights. So there was a case in a city north of Boston where a police officer pushed an old drunk into the harbor of the city. The drunk was not an attractive man. He was an old man. He was a real pain in the neck. The guy drowned. He could swim but not well enough. Everybody turns and looks the other way, says this is an old drunk. He wasn't black, he was white. So I prosecuted him and I didn't have any jurisdiction for murder because that's, you know, that's not a federal offense. But I prosecuted him for a section 1983 civil rights violation and I got 15 years sentence in the penitentiary, the federal penitentiary for that.

That's making a choice to prosecute something that you think should be prosecuted and I would do that with voter suppression efforts. And I think they're so brazen, it's going to be easy to prove. Well, how do Republicans then strategize a future where you are prosecuting voter suppression, but also facing in lots of states a growing, at least baseline demographic disadvantage. If you don't have black voters in Georgia or North Carolina, how do you win? Well, tough luck. I mean, when I ran for reelection, I had a rainbow coalition. And in this election, it very much pays me to have a

rainbow coalition because I don't particularly want to go into the lists against Donald Trump, having nobody but the party officials of the Republican Party in the 50 states deciding who's going to win that election. So I'm going to be reaching out to millennials, to women. A mention was made of these atrocious reproductive rights statutes that have recently passed, which take the position that women are chattel, that they're carriers, that rapists are more important than women who have a choice as to whether or not to, you know, exercise their reproductive rights.

People, one of the statutes says there's a 99-year sentence for a doctor who performs an abortion. I say, how about a 99-year sentence for the rapist if he doesn't pay full child support for his kid he was so happy to sire. That would be a more just approach in my view. So I would reach out for everybody's vote and I wouldn't face the dilemma that you posit Republicans would have in that if I'm going to be out prosecuting voter suppression and they want to suppress votes, that's their problem. That's not my problem. You mentioned women. There are only eight Republican women in the Senate out of 100,

as you know, compared to 17 Democratic women. In the House, it's even worse. There are only 13 Republican Congresswomen compared to 89 Democratic Congresswomen. Why do you think that is? And what does the Republican Party need to do to fix the representation that we have in the party moving forward? The Republican Party in Washington needs to be a lot different than it is. I'll give you a... But it's not just in Washington. There was just a special election a few weeks ago in which a Republican woman was viewed as not as conservative as her male counterpart, even though she was. It's all around the country. Republicans everywhere. Yeah, so, you know, when I was governor, my cabinet consisted of eight women and three men.

So that's kind of the vantage point from which I approach this. I think it's outrageous there aren't more women in Congress. Outrageous. Why do you think that's the case? More Republican women. Well, probably they think that the Republican Party in Washington is run by a bunch of good old boys. They might even be right about that.

They might be. Are they? Yeah, are they? Let me put it this way. I was taking the task for being insensitive here. I thought that the abortion statutes were not a good idea because really whether someone should terminate a pregnancy or not is really her business. It's not the business of a bunch of fat old white guys in Washington, D.C., 700 miles away. And I was taking the task for

calling anyone fat. What makes you a Republican? You know, my first job was working for Senator Jack Javits of New York, a Republican senator. Twenty-two years old, I was writing his foreign policy speeches. It was a heady brew. The Kennedys were in the Senate. It was a time when lions still strode the earth in the Senate. If someone was making a big speech, the galleries, the Senate galleries would be filled with reporters, with students, with interns, with spouses wanting to hear and see whether they were going to be persuaded. Those were the good old days, man. And it started to go south in 1994, and it's been going south ever since. The bitterness in

Washington, D.C., and I've said this often, the two parties are locked in a death spiral embrace. They're embraced because they need each other to stoke up their own base, to give them a lot of money so they can get reelected. But policy-wise, what makes you a Republican? How is Bill Weld?

I'm a fiscal conservative. I was voted the most fiscally conservative governor in the United States when I was in office in Massachusetts. And this is coming right after Michael Dukakis in the state of Massachusetts. So that took some choosing. Talking about government is choosing. I'm a strong environmentalist. I associate that with the Republican Party, historically conserving the environment. I know President Trump is getting a lot of credit for deregulation. If you look closely at what he's deregulated, it's the protections to preserve clean air

and clean water for the citizens of the United States. The only ones that aren't at EPA are in the financial area to take away the protections that the Dodd-Frank bill gave, again, for little people, for ordinary people. You know, the big banks regulations, the ability of Reg T, Reg Y. Oh, no, there's no D-Reg there. You've said that the Republican Party you worry is becoming too closely associated with the party of racism. I sure did. Then why are you comfortable running as a Republican? Well, I'm running as my kind of Republican.

I'm not saying I'm Donald Trump Jr., quite the reverse. Well, then do you agree that the Republican Party is the party of Donald Trump? He has an 89% approval rating among Republicans. You see the ways in which Republicans in Congress fall less around him. Yeah, no, I think he's certainly captivated, if not captured, the party in Washington. You mentioned in 1994 the change with the Republican Party that you think has continued since. Look, I know a lot of the senior and some of the mid-rank Republicans in the Senate and some in the House in Washington. They're very decent people.

I worked with them over the years. They've just gone silent. And I think it's Stockholm syndrome. They identify with their cap door. Either that or they're obsessed with getting reelected, in which case, shame on them. But these people are old friends of mine. It's too early in the cycle for me to go to them and say, speak up, speak out. But when I started earlier in the year, people would ask me, are you surprised that no one else has joined you in standing up and being counted? And I was kind of nonplussed by the question for a while.

But now, yeah, I'm surprised. I'm surprised. What about the alternative hypothesis, which is just that all these folks actually believe Donald Trump? Oh, no, no, no, no For example in New Hampshire, I sense no support for Trump on the ground That party it's a New England Republican Party It's 65% pro-choice on the abortion question, which is not typical at all of Republican parties around the country But I go in there I shook hands with 240 people and three big diners in New Hampshire in one morning,

and I did not detect a single Trump voter in the entire morning. And these are people who are already irritated by having their breakfast interrupted by me. I think you were referring to Republicans in Congress, right? Yeah, the folks in Congress. The people you've known for years who have been silent. What if they're just silent because they actually agree? Oh, no, they don't agree with him.

I'm not talking just about the Republicans in New Hampshire. No, no. If I talk with my old friends in Washington, they just shake their head and make a face. But isn't that the problem? Isn't that perpetuating the problems we're seeing out there? Yeah, that's a big problem. Yeah, I'm not saying that isn't a problem.

In fact, I'm predicting that if that doesn't change, I think President Trump is seeming more unhinged almost by the week. And I think he's finally going to lose it. And people are going to see that, if not next month, maybe the beginning of next year. I think he's going to go down to a blowout defeat and if the Republicans on the hill don't change their tone of voice they're going to go down with them you're going to see an election like 1974 the Nixon impeachment

and a lot of Republicans underwent the draining effort of defending Richard Nixon until the last dog died. And the last dog died only when the tapes came out proving that he'd been lying all along. And these were very upright, honorable Republicans. And they just, they all got beat. Governor Weld, thank you. Thank you.

You have two minutes now for your closing remarks. Thank you. So of course, the problem with everything I said I wanted to do is that the man in the White House doesn't want to have anything to do with it. And I think, as I've said, that he's got almost blood on his hands from recent events. And I think he's very reprehensible. And so it's time for us to say to him what he has said to others, which is, we wish you would go back to where you came from.

Go back to boasting that you and your father have ways of keeping people of color out of your housing developments. Go back to filing for bankruptcy to cheat little people out of the money that you owe them. Go back to judging beauty contests for a profession and going to parties with Jeffrey Epstein with young girls, all of which he has done and which he cannot deny. And that has been his life. Go back to the art of the deal where cheating and lying and bluffing is the order of the day

and cruelty is an art form. Go back to all that. Just as you've said to others, they should go back where they came from. Go back to where you came from, Mr. President, and thank you. Governor Welk, thank you. Governor Bill Welk.

Have you spoken with him or heard from him? I don't know. Oh, I knew him in New York in the old days. But you haven't heard from him since you announced? No. Yeah. A big thank you to all of our candidates. That was quite the evening. Oh, man.

Yeah. That was quite the evening. I had fun. And thank you all as well for your time this evening. And we certainly hope that you enjoy the rest of the National Association of Black Journalists Convention. Yes. We'll see you tonight.

We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. evening. And we certainly hope that you enjoy the rest of the National Association of Black Journalists Convention. We'll see you tonight. We'll see you tomorrow. Any final thoughts?

Thank you. This is an iHeart Podcast.