The Daily - The Democratic Presidential Field (So Far)

Episode Date: February 20, 2019

Senator Bernie Sanders has entered a crowded field of Democratic presidential candidates. We look at how candidates who agree on many social issues are fighting to distinguish themselves in order to beat President Trump. Guest: Alexander Burns, who covers national politics for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, Bernie Sanders enters a crowded field of Democratic presidential candidates. How those candidates, who agree on so many social issues, are fighting to distinguish themselves in order to beat President Trump. It's Wednesday, February 20th.

Good morning, Lawrence! I stand here today to declare that I am a candidate for President of the United States. I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for President of the United States. To announce my candidacy for President of the United States. I'm filing an exploratory committee for President of the United States tonight. I'm running for President because I want to address these issues. Hi, I'm Bernie Sanders. I'm running for President. And I'm asking you today to be part of an unprecedented grassroots campaign.

And we are going to do this again. Alex Burns, what does Bernie Sanders' announcement mean for the 2020 presidential race? Well, it really means that now we have a full spectrum of Democratic candidates running from sort of quasi-Marxist to avowedly moderate. That might sound like we now have this messy, shapeless field, but in reality, they are all basically debating the same central question, which is, who has what it takes to beat Donald Trump? All the candidates, all the voters from different wings of the party basically agree that that is the overarching theme of this primary. They just all have different answers to that basic question. And as these Democratic candidates debate visions for beating Trump,

I have to imagine that is a calculation about moving left and embracing kind of the politics of identity or tacking to the right to go after Trump voters, moderates. Well, you're sort of half right there that there is a debate about whether the party needs to move to the left or to the center, but the fault lines are almost entirely about the economy, that when it comes to matters of identity and different social justice issues, there's very, very little disagreement across the field.

When you think about the issues that are now just consensus positions in the Democratic Party, support for gay marriage, support for abortion rights, support for very restrictive gun control laws. I don't know that you would have had a field. We didn't have a field 10 years ago, 15, 20 years ago, where there was basically no daylight on any of those issues, that the party is a liberal party on cultural matters. And the candidates themselves obviously have very different identities. But in terms of where they are on those issues, there's not a great deal of daylight.

When it comes to stuff like health care and taxation and financial regulation, that's when you start to see the differences really open up. That right now is where the Democratic debate is going to focus. I guess I'm curious, why is there such a wide spectrum on economic issues where there isn't when it comes to social issues? Well, this is going to get very weighty very fast. But I think you can look back over the last decade since the Great Recession and see just an enormous opening up of the range of economic debate in American politics, that in 1992 or 2000, you didn't have candidates running for the Democratic nomination for president calling themselves Democratic socialists or calling for just a colossal rewriting of the American economy. Now you have most candidates not calling themselves Democratic socialists, but calling for really transformational change

of some kind or another. I think you can find the roots to that in the recession. I think you can find the roots to that in Bernie Sanders in 2015. And finally, I think you can see the Trump presidency just as an enormously disruptive force in this space. I think Democrats, liberal Democrats, see how the president blew up the debate around economics on the Republican side, especially on matters like trade and just the nature of the global economy. And there's no reason now for folks on the left not to do the same thing on their side. It's kind of their turn to be incredibly disruptive when it comes to economics. Right. And they don't have on the right a mainstream traditional

Republican president who they worry will make them look outside the mainstream. That if you are campaigning against a President Jeb Bush or a President Marco Rubio who passed a very traditional, modest, middle-class tax cut and who says the right things about economic inequality and pursues sort of modest tinkering to NAFTA, I think Democrats probably do feel a little bit more trepidation about campaigning on a really daring, disruptive, relatively far-left agenda. That's not the mood of the Democratic Party right now. Right. Instead, you have a candidate on the right, an almost assured nominee,

who deliberately provokes trade wars and tears up almost every major economic agreement we have signed as a country in the last 25 years. Right. So Democrats aren't looking at Donald Trump and saying, we need to really make sure that we reassure the business community and make sure that we don't, you know, make folks on the center right nervous because the president does those things already. So I think from Democrats close to the middle to Democrats well to the left, there is just this universal feeling that they've got to go big on an economic vision in some way.

So let's start off at the most disruptive end of the economic spectrum here. Hi, I'm Bernie Sanders. I'm running for president. I imagine that that is Bernie Sanders, right? Why does he believe that he is best positioned to beat President Trump? Our 2015 and 2016, which is that if you're running against a candidate in Donald Trump in a political party like the Republican Party, that is defined in the eyes of many voters as a party of great wealth and a party that is aligned with powerful corporate interests. You run right at that great wealth and those powerful corporate interests. And we are the wealthiest nation in the history of the world.

We should not have a grotesque level of wealth inequality in which three billionaires now own more wealth than the bottom half of the country. Part of what has won him the passionate following he has is his directness in marshalling people's sense of political alienation and economic dissatisfaction in a really class-oriented way. Our campaign is about creating a government and economy that works for the many, not just the few. He talks about trying to, you know, bring together voters who are economically distressed across lines of geography and culture and race in a way that other candidates don't necessarily. I'm running for president because the time

is long overdue for the United States to join every other major country on earth and guarantee health care to all people as a right, not a privilege, through a Medicare for all single payer program. You know, his theory is that if you talk about giving people government guaranteed health care, that appeals as much to an African-American woman in Los Angeles as it does to a white coal miner in West Virginia. That theory has not really been tested the way Bernie Sanders would like to test it. There is very, very substantial evidence from the last few rounds of national elections that culture is such a dominant force in American

elections that I think it does cast some doubt on whether that would work in a general election because together you and I and our 2016 campaign began the political revolution. Now it is time to complete that revolution and implement the vision that we fought for. You know, he's talking about revolution. That's the word he uses, and he uses it for a reason. So the question here is, can he run a race that's all about class, and will that work? Can he make it all about the 1% versus the 99% and actually succeed? Right. And the question is, does the 99% see themselves as a coherent entity? Or do other kinds of social and cultural divisions make the aspiration to a cross-racial, national workers campaign just sort of a fantasy?

Right. Right. We'd probably know if there was a 99% club of voters that saw itself as one entity waiting to be tapped. Anytime a politician tells you that 80% of people agree strongly with their position on something as sensitive as healthcare or the bedrock nature of the American economy, they're estimating. So who's next on this democratic spectrum, remembering that we're going kind of left to less left?

Well, you know, a lot of these people are tricky to categorize ideologically, but I think the person you would have to put closest to Bernie Sanders, but with some very, very significant philosophical and personal modifications is Elizabeth Warren. some very, very significant philosophical and personal modifications is Elizabeth Warren. The middle class squeeze is real and millions of families can barely breathe. It is not right. She's a candidate who is running a populist campaign. Hardworking people are up against a small group that holds far too much power, not just in our economy, but also in our democracy. She is targeting banks, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies. And when giant corporations and their leaders cheat their customers, stomp out their competitors and rob their workers, let's prosecute them.

But unlike Bernie Sanders, she's very explicit about calling herself a capitalist. We can't afford just to tinker around the edges of tax credit here or regulation there. Our fight is for big structural change. That is a huge tonal and substantive difference from Bernie Sanders. She's not talking about blowing up and incinerating the entire system and rebuilding it from the ground up.

She is talking about using all the levers of power in government to take control of a system that she argues is out of control. Right. So cleaning it up, not blowing it up. Right. We need to change the rules to clean up Washington, end the corruption. So in that sense, she would be appealing to the Trump voters' same desire to drain the swamp. If there is a drain-the-swamp candidate in the Democratic primary, it is Elizabeth Warren. Corruption is the central theme of her campaign as much as anything else. I have proposed the strongest and most comprehensive anti-corruption law since Watergate.

But the basic political logic of a Warren campaign is not all that different from the logic of a Sanders campaign. It's about harnessing alienation with the political system. It's about telling people that, yeah, you're right, the economy is rigged, and I'm going to do something very, very drastic about it. We need to take power in Washington away from the wealthy and well-connected and put it back in the hands of the people where it belongs. Her campaign represents, you know, again, not a Sanders-like rejection of what's normal, but definitely a rejection of what's normal. So what is the risk of a Warren-like candidate if, by your description, she's kind of a Democratic Trump-like candidate in her attempts to sell herself as a fixer of a broken system? There are a couple risks in a Warren candidacy.

There are a couple risks in a Warren candidacy. The biggest one is she is putting essentially all her chips on the idea that voters are alienated from the economy, and that is going to be the consuming issue for them in this election. It's a bet that people are not just a little bit dissatisfied with how things are working right now, that they are profoundly dissatisfied, and that whatever other issues they may care about, it's issues about the economy and the power of corporations that matter more than anything else. So her focus may be too narrow. Well, we just don't know what voters are going to care about most a year from now.

And in some ways, it's a daring bet. In some ways, it's a very risky bet to think that these core issues that have been the issues that have defined your career are going to be the decisive issues, first in the primary, then in the general election. It's not that she only talks about these issues, but, you know, I was in Iowa with her for a day pretty recently, and the balance of themes related to corruption and corporate power versus all other themes in her stump speech, it's just overwhelmingly lopsided. Who is in the next band over? So if you think of Sanders and Warren,

who are candidates really preoccupied with economic populism and whose basic campaign bargain is, let's tax the wealthy and go after corporations in order to create new welfare benefits for other people, you then get into this next band of candidates, and they're a little bit harder to characterize ideologically.

Candidates like Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, these are candidates who are all campaigning as liberals and who have endorsed big liberal goals. I am running to declare education is a fundamental right. I believe that health care should be a right and not a privilege. People in America are losing faith that this nation will work for them. And we will guarantee that right with universal pre-k and debt-free college. I believe we should have better public schools because it shouldn't matter what block you grow up on. My record as a mayor, my record as a senator is fighting those interests that are trying to screw people.

And when it comes to defending folk, I will be ferocious. But they are much more cautious about the way they talk about enacting that change. What is your solution to ensure that people have access to quality health care at an affordable price? And does that solution involve cutting insurance companies as we know them out of the equation? We saw this very memorably with Kamala Harris in her first few days as a candidate when she first, in a CNN event, endorsed getting rid of the private health care system entirely. I believe the solution, and I actually feel very strongly about this, is that we need to have Medicare for all. That's just the bottom line. The Bernie Sanders-like position, and then... Senator Harris is now backtracking a bit on her call to eliminate private health insurers. Her spokesman tells us she is open to more moderate

plans that preserve the private health care industry. Quickly clarified that she favors any number of ways of getting to universal health care coverage, not necessarily the Bernie Sanders approach. Her signature economic proposal is a big tax cut. We will deliver the largest working and middle class tax cut in a generation. Targeted at the middle class, paid for by increasing taxes and changing the kinds of taxes that are applied to much wealthier people. We'll pay for it by reversing this administration's giveaways to the top big corporations and the top 1%. That is a much more conventional way of thinking about how you gain credibility on the economy.

Our planet is in peril and we need to be bold. It's one of the reasons why I signed on to the resolution, I co-sponsored the resolution for the Green New Deal. I think that once you get to Cory Booker, you're even a couple clicks closer to the political center. And there's a lot of people now that are blowing back on the Green New Deal. They're like, oh, it's impractical. Oh, it's too expensive. Oh, it's all of this.

If we used to govern our dreams that way, we would have never gone to the moon. God, that's impractical. You see that ball in the sky? He endorses the Green New Deal as sort of an aspirational goal, but he doesn't endorse the full program, wouldn't expect to enact it as president. And my parents taught me reach for the moon, reach for the stars. And even if you come up short, at least you're going to be hovering above the ground. You'll be soaring on that. He is somebody who you start to hear speaking in more pragmatic terms about simply what he considers possible in a divided government. And when the planet has been in peril in the past,

who came forward to save Earth from the scourge of Nazi and totalitarian regimes? We came forward. I imagine that the idea for this group of Democratic candidates is to appeal to every conceivable voter by seeming pragmatic and flexible, a bit malleable. But I imagine that the risk here is gaining a reputation for being inauthentic, maybe even phony. Yeah, the risk is

that you end up trying to be all things to all people and being nothing in particular to anybody. And this is a particularly pointed distinction on economic issues and issues related to inequality and corporate power, that if you're a candidate who talks big on taking on health insurance companies, taking on banks, making sure that, you know, the 99% start catching up with the 1%, people might at some point expect you to propose policy ideas that would actually achieve that outcome. And there's a great risk in being seen as a candidate who endorses a bunch of very grand liberal goals, and then there's always a but. I'm thinking, of course, of Hillary Clinton taking Wall Street money while calling for Wall Street reform.

If there's one consistent theme we've seen in politics over the last few years in both parties, it's the importance of personal and ideological authenticity. And that is something that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren obviously have in spades. And once you start to get to candidates who are trying to bridge divides in the party, it just becomes more complicated. If you are Donald Trump, what you're hoping for is a Democratic candidate who will either be so far left that they cannot appeal to the middle or a candidate who has tied themselves intoaddle the left and the center, who are trying to be both revolutionary and exciting and also non-threatening to voters who are more traditional voters. A long primary is going to test whether the core of who they are really fits that description. So you're kind of tracking pretzel status. So that leaves us with the actual moderates.

And who are they so far? Well, right now— For too long, leaders in Washington have sat on the sidelines while others tried to figure out what to do about the changing economy and its impact on our lives. There's really only one major candidate in the race who is positioning herself very directly as a moderate, and that's Amy Klobuchar. We have seen her, more than any other candidate, willing to just say no to some of the really big liberal trophy ideas like Medicare for All, like free college. — Yes or no, would you support free college for all? — I am not for free four-year college for all, no. Thank you. — We have talked about candidates who say yes, but, free four-year college for all, no. Thank you.

We have talked about candidates who say yes, but, but she's a candidate who just says no. I wish if I was a magic genie and could give that to everyone and we could afford it, I would. I'm just trying to find a mix of incentives. And we're going to see whether there's an appetite for that in the Democratic Party. Somebody who says, I'm just going to level with you. I'm not going to do that because I don't think it's possible.

Here are the things I am going to do. Getting to universal health care and bringing down, bringing down the cost of prescription drugs. It's a bet that voters will reward candor and realism. Look, if you're Amy Klobuchar, you're taking a big risk on the idea that voters will reward candor and realism. Look, if you're Amy Klobuchar, you're taking a big risk on the idea that voters will accept less if they think that they can get it for sure, as opposed to promising them more

with some uncertainty about whether it's achievable. It is time to organize, time to galvanize, time to take back our democracy. It's time, America. A really significant portion of the Democratic Party self-identifies as moderate, not conservative, but they are suspicious of Medicare for all. They are suspicious of some of the really grand transformational promises that they hear from the more liberal candidates. And right now, if you split up the pie on the left between the candidates we've talked about, there's a big slice of pie left closer to the political center. And Amy Klobuchar is the only person, with the possible

exception of Cory Booker, who's going right at it. So the space that she's in could get crowded if suddenly Joe Biden runs and Mike Bloomberg runs and Terry McAuliffe or John Hickenlooper, former governors from Virginia and Colorado, run. Then she won't be alone. That middle space could get real crowded. Hmm. It feels like the risk here in the Democrats building their message and their platforms of the Democratic Party promising to blow things up. And they're going to think to themselves, I don't want to blow up this system that's working reasonably well for me. It's entirely possible.

And one of the ironies of the race that we're seeing so far is Donald Trump as kind of a status quo candidate, as a let's not shake things up too much candidate on the specific issue of the economy. He's obviously not that kind of candidate or president more generally. But this is also a place where in some ways Democrats are taking a lesson from Trump's candidacy in 2016. I think we all remember when Trump was out there talking about make America great again, that one of the really big Democratic applause lines was America is already great. And it turns out that a lot of voters did not agree with that. And the president is counting on that working for him in 2020. So make America's economy greater could basically be the Democratic Party slogan for 2020. Absolutely. The core of the Democratic message in 2020 will almost certainly be about the economy,

unless we have some kind of catastrophic intervening event that nobody is hoping for. And because they feel that the economic message is what was missing last time, they all basically agree with each other and they all basically agree with Hillary Clinton on social and cultural issues that are at the heart of American politics. And they all disagree strongly with Donald Trump on those issues where they don't agree with each other and where the party has not yet found its identity on the national level is on these economic issues. And it's where they don't know with each other and where the party has not yet found its identity on the national level is on these economic issues. And it's where they don't know where the country is.

It's where they don't know where a controlling coalition of voters can be found. They know what it looks like to win a midterm election with an economic message. They know what it looks like to lose a presidential election with a weak economic message. They don't yet know what it means to put together a winning message on the economy in the Trump era in a presidential race. Alex, thank you very much. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

A Times investigation has uncovered several previously unknown attempts by President Trump ally to oversee an investigation into his hush money payments to two women who said they had affairs with Trump. Whitaker declined, souring his relationship with the president. conversations with Republican lawmakers, including Representative Matt Gaetz, about a campaign to attack the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and use the lawmakers' congressional oversight power to try to undercut Mueller. The lawmakers, the Times found, did just that. And the federal judge handling the case of Roger Stone, a longtime Trump advisor charged with lying to federal prosecutors in the Russia investigation, is demanding to know why Stone posted a menacing photo on Instagram

that included a close-up picture of the judge, her name, and what appeared to be the crosshairs of a gun near her head. The judge ordered a special court hearing set for tomorrow to address the image which Stone has since apologized for and deleted. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.