The New Yorker Radio Hour - Cory Booker on How to Defeat Donald Trump

Episode Date: September 27, 2019

Senator Cory Booker burst onto the national scene about a decade ago, after serving as the mayor of the notoriously impoverished and dangerous city of Newark, New Jersey. To get that job, Booker challenged an entrenched establishment. “My political training comes from the roughest of rough campaigns,” he tells David Remnick. “You just won’t think it’s America, the kind of stuff we had to go up against. And it [was] such a great way to learn [that campaigning] has to be retail—grassroots. And so much of this, in those early primary states, is about that.”    Booker spoke with Remnick about growing up black in a largely white area of New Jersey, where his parents had to fight to be able to buy a home; about his long relationship with the Kushner family, which started back when Jared Kushner’s father, Charles, was a leading Democratic donor; and why he’s proud to collaborate with even his direst political opponents on issues such as criminal-justice reform. “Donald Trump signed my bill,” Booker states. “I worked with him and his White House to pass a bill that liberated thousands of black people from prison” by retroactively reducing unjustly high sentences related to crack cocaine. “Tell that liberated person that Cory Booker should not deal with somebody that he fundamentally disagrees with.”   Note: In this interview, Senator Booker asserts, “We now have more African-Americans in this country under criminal supervision than all the slaves in 1850.” The historical accuracy of this comparison has been challenged. More accurately, the number of African-American men under criminal supervision today has been compared to the number of African-American men enslaved in 1850.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Let me just put it my perspective on this, which is for me, this is a moment of constitutional vandalism like I've never seen in my lifetime. I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, and we have a president that won't submit themselves to the checks and balances of our Constitution. He is undermining the ability for Congress to do its job and investigate. That was the line that crossed for me. I was not immediately calling for impeachment. I was saying, let's investigate after the Mueller report, but Congress hasn't been able to do their job. Last week, on Monday, Senator Cory Booker came to the studio and we talked about many things,

but top of our minds was, of course, the prospect of impeachment. There will be a point in history where people look back on us and say, what did people do when the Constitution was under assault and being violated? Just one day after we spoke, the political world changed completely. The actions of the Trump presidency revealed a dishonorable fact of the president's betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security, and betrayal of the integrity of our elections. Therefore, today, I'm announcing the House of Representatives moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry. Speaker Pelosi's reluctance up until that point had been frustrating to Booker and to many other Democrats.

But her motive was plain and may turn out to be extremely strong. crude, Pelosi has felt all along that if the House began impeachment too soon and with too little public support and it died in the Senate, as it still likely might, then Democratic candidates would suffer badly in the 2020 elections. Politics be damned. This is a moment, a moral moment that we should stand up and say, because the precedent that it sets is whoever, the Democrat, Republican, future presidents, yeah, trash the Constitution and the checks and balances. And because if the politics don't line up, you're not going to be impeached.

But politics be damned even if it hands an election to Donald Trump. I have more faith in the American people right now. Do you? Absolutely. And they've shown it in the 2018 election. Hell, they showed it in the first weeks of this presidency. In the crowded field vying for the 2020 nomination, Senator Booker is looking still for a breakout moment. And he hasn't gotten it yet. He pledged not to take contributions from corporate PACs or lobbyists.

and now his campaign is desperately short of cash. In fact, it could even fold very soon. But Booker is an accomplished candidate on the stump, and he's certainly not short on ambition. His agenda includes sweeping criminal justice reform and a $3 trillion climate package. He came up in politics as the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, a city that suffered badly from the loss of manufacturing,

from abandonment, poverty, violence, neglect of every kind. As mayor, he succeeded, in revitalizing Newark's downtown, and he oversaw a drop in the notoriously high crime rate there. Then there was the time that Cory Booker rushed into a burning house and saved the life of one of his constituents. He seemed to have a knack for making the right move at the right time. You are polling now at 2%, and you just put out essentially a plea for more funds, otherwise you're not going to be able to continue your campaign. And you were looking for $1.7 million, I believe, by the end of September, which is fast upon us.

What's been the problem and what are the prospects? Well, two things. I want to just talk about polls for a second, because we've polled everywhere from 2 to 6 percent, usually around number six in all the pollers. But the one thing that most folks know, and it's a truth of my life, your life, is that nobody in the Democratic Party who's ever been polling ahead right now in a presidential race has ever gone on to be president. the people we've elected, Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama were all considered long shots, some of them barely registering in the polls, who then went on and upset usually in Iowa and New Hampshire and then go on to the nomination. And so polls wildly are not what people should be looking at. What we've been building this campaign to do is to win. This wasn't a vanity play.

The way you win is by going directly to the grassroots. And we built what everybody from the Des Moines Register to Iowa starting line unequivocally has said, the two best teams in Iowa. Iowa on the ground are Corey Booker and Elizabeth Warren. And more than that, in Iowa, New Hampshire, we're leading all candidates in the endorsements of local elected officials, mayors, state representatives, even state senators we lead in both states. And so we are showing our ability to win. But the one thing is the people who are at the top of the polls right now are the people that walked into this with, you know, Bernie and Biden, 100% name recognition. But is the problem ideological? In other words, I think the electorate even modestly,

engaged, knows that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren represent the so-called progressive wing of the party, and Joe Biden represents the so-called moderate wing of the party. Where are you in that? And are you projecting it in a clear enough way? So I just resist that orientation because of what people I talk to. You know, I know that that's the way Washington we think and a lot of the pundits think, but you talk to people on the ground. In fact, you can see this data-wise. Look at who's supporting Elizabeth Warren right now. You see people coming from Biden.

You see people coming from Bernie. I think what people really want is somebody they believe can beat Donald Trump. And what I'm finding, the reason why I think we're doing so well in Iowa with commitment to caucus cards, endorsements, is because people want somebody that can excite the whole electorate, that can energize and heal this country. That's not just about who's got a better 15-point policy plan. For me, this is about a revival of civic grace. How do we have a more courageous empathy in our country? How do we create a context for new American majorities, not in a partisan sense, but in the history

that I love in our nation that's allowed us to advance on to beat Jim Crow when Sputnik was up to beat go to the moon first? These weren't partisan majorities that did these things. These were a people that had a moral imagination that were able to excite that in our country, where we all joined together in common cause. So I just think that the theme of this election, is not fight fire with fire. I ran a fire department in Newark.

That's not a good way to put out fire. But it really comes to the core of King, one of my favorite quotes from King, which is what we have to repent for in this day and age, is not the vitriolic words and violent actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and inaction of the good people. This presidential election is not a referendum

on one guy in one office. It is a referendum on who we are as a people and who we are to each other. I've got to ask you a question about a book. Richard Ben Kramer, long ago, the late Richard Ben Kramer, wrote a book about a presidential campaign that on the surface did not seem to be the most exciting campaign of all time. And it's called What It Takes. And the strength of that book is that through profiles of all the candidates and really deep reporting, you got a sense of what it really takes to run for president in terms of endurance, almost the physicality of running, the granular details of running. running for president. What has surprised you? And what can you tell us about that human experience

of running for president, even in these early months? Well, it is a physical endurance test, and it does reveal who you are and how you deal. And what kind of campaign that you run? My political training, you know, there's an Oscar-nominated documentary about it called Street Fight. My political training comes from the roughest of rough campaigns, where you, tires on my car, slash windows smashed my phone's tapped um you agreed it as an outsider by a lot of by the kind of political machine in newark underdog i mean everything imaginable against us uh national political people coming to campaign against us so this to me reminded me of barraq obama's attempt to beat bobby rush it is so similar i hope people watch the movie because it is you just won't think it's america

what the kind of stuff we had to go up against and it it is such a great way to to learn that it has to be retail grassroots. And so much of this in those early primary states is about that. People want to kick your tires. They want to- Anybody slashing them? No. But what's the experience? Obviously, you're not getting your tires slashed. But what is surprising you about the experience of running for president? The goodness of people. You don't get the opposite. I, God, I don't. In fact, other camps, when I was walking through the Iowa steak fry as a vegan, I, and we put out. there that we were not going to stay in the campaign if we couldn't raise money. I had people

in other T-shirts, other candidates' t-shirts saying, oh, I'm an ex-person supporter, but need you in this race, man. I gave you five bucks. And there is a decency and a goodness. And even my campaign team, we got together and said, Corey, you know, the sentiment of folks is they don't want to beat Donald Trump. They would like to eliminate him from the planet Earth. And you're going to start this campaign talking about a more courageous empathy, a revival of civic grace. I still remember one of my favorite moments in the campaign is I'm going to the stage in Iowa. To a big town hall, we're blown away, like how many people showed up. And a big guy sees me.

I'm a big guy, former tight end for Stanford and puts his arm around me, thinks he's going to have sort of a bro moment and says, dude, I want you to punch Donald Trump in the face. And I look at him and I go, dude, that's a felony. And just sit down and let me explain to you why that's the exact wrong approach to beating Donald Trump. And I made the case on the on like I do in every town hall that I know I'm angry. I'm hurt. And if you look around America right now, if America's not breaking your heart, you don't love her enough. And and and and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and let me just make you, demagogues and bullies and fear mongers is how. Michelle Obama tells us, when they go low, we go high, and that was tried in 2016.

And maybe that didn't work out so well. So where are you on that? Well, let me just make you two historical points to you. The first one. is about what sentiment wins. McCarthyism to Governor Wallace's bigotry and hate and fear mongering. We didn't beat Bull Connor

because we brought bigger dogs and bigger fire hoses. We didn't beat him because we demeaned and degraded him and personally, but we had artists. Is Donald Trump Bull Connor? I mean, his brand of white supremacy, his brand of bigotry and racism that he's preaching from the highest office in the land, he sounds more like George Wallace

and he does George Washington. And remember, we beat, Bull Connor by artists of activism who called to the moral imagination of this country and created excited and ignited new majorities. And so you can go from how do we beat the fearmongering of McCarthyism. We don't beat it by playing on their turf on their terms using their tactics. This president will not be beaten by us out nicknaming him or by demeaning and degrading. That's playing into the darkness that he's trying to drag this country in. You grew up in Jersey about 10 minutes from where I did,

and the town you grew up in was almost completely white, if I remember it well, pretty damn white. And you come from a family of first black executives at IBM. How did your parents talk to you about race in those particular circumstances at that particular time, and then how do you think about it today, what they were telling you? Well, you must have been gravely, gravely disappointed

by 2016, to put it unbelievably mildly. Look, my parents were not in any way hesitant at telling my brother and I about the wretchedness and bigotry and hate in this country. When I was about to get my driver's license, I remember my parents having a conversation with me that I thought was I made my normal wry teenage jokes and the seriousness in their eyes and the fear in their eyes

to helping me understand that I would have a different experience as it turned out they were predicted right, with police officers than my high school friends. But this is the thing that... You predicted right. What was your experience? Oh, my God. I couldn't come over with the George Washington Bridge in the 80s

without being pulled over. I mean, this was the days that people used to go over to Washington Heights by drugs. You and I keep up in the same area, come right back over. Black guy alone in a car pulled over all the time. Palisades Parkway. Car surrounded.

I can tell horrible, indignant stories. They're just walking into Jersey malls and being followed. You're not a young black man in the era of Willie Horton and all the fear mongering about super predators. You just couldn't be a young. My 20s have painful stories. But this is what my parents told me.

They said, what defines us, not just as a family, but as a country, is not that there's bigotry, hatred, and racism. There's always been, but how we respond to them. You talk about me being the first black family in an all white town as my father affectionately called us, the four raisins in a tub of sweet vanilla ice cream. We got there because of white people who saw that we were getting turned away in town after town every time my parents in 1969 tried to buy home. In Bergen County, New Jersey. In Burgen County, New Jersey. And so what happened? They found a group of mostly white people, some blacks, who met in a living room on the

weekends and decided to do a sting operation that sent my parents out with a volunteer white couple behind them. When my parents were told the house was sold or pulled off the market, the white couple found out the house was still for sale. In the house I grew up in, the white couple put a bid on the house, bit accepted, papers drawn up. On the day of the closing, the white couple did not show up in the real estate agent's office. My father did, and a volunteer lawyer named Marty Friedman, white guy Jewish, and they march into the real estate agent's office. And by the way, the real estate agent didn't capitulate. He stands up and punches Marty Friedman in the face and sticks a dog on my dad. We got...

This is not Montgomery in 1950. No, this is New Jersey, 1969. My parents fought violence and racism to grow up in my house. My parents told me that story. But they also told me the story about the good people who understood that patriotism is love of country, but you can't love your country, unless you love your fellow country, men and women. And love isn't sentimentality. Love is sacrifice and its service is saying if your kids don't have a great public school to go to,

my kids are lesser off. This is a very hard question to ask. But again, it goes to the Obama experience in Chicago when he first ran for Congress. He was running against Bobby Rush, who was a fixture of the South Side. He's still in Congress. Obama, you know, came from Hawaii. He was living on the South Side. He was been an organizer, a state senator.

And he comes into Bobby Rush's district, and he has told repeatedly that he has, and it's a horrible phrase, not black enough, over and over and over again. And he lost by a big margin. You had the same thing happen when you came to Newark. First time around, you got beat like a drum. No, no, no, no, no. By people in town. No, no, no, no. Please, the evolution is much different than that.

Go ahead. Came in as a tenant organizer, worked with tenant leaders all over the city, who then said to me, run for office. And I said no. And we got into, I got into a, not a fight, because these were elders in my community, but I finally said, okay, I will be your candidate.

we ran in the central ward of Newark where there was the most public housing, the most dense poverty for a city council seat at a time that in general, city council people didn't leave office unless it was death or conviction. And we was running against guy

40 years old in me in an impossible election and we won in the majority black ward in the lowest district. So I served four years on the city council before I took on Sharp James.

And that's when the rhetoric you're talking about. Believe me, understand. But why did the rhetoric kick in so bad? And it wasn't just Sharp James saying it. There were people all over the city that were, I remember it well, really hard on you. Yeah. In a city where, in my growing up, if I remember correctly, every mayor of Newark went to jail until you. Yes. Hugh Adnesio, Ken Gibson, eventually Sharp James. Real Carlin going back even further. Exactly. Look, the reality is we had a hard-fought close election and our opponent used every possible imaginable tool. I mean, you remember on, you know, ABC TV saying this guy is a tool of the Jews. I mean, just remarks that like we found stunning. He's like using comments that were so objectionable. KKK member. Oh, the CIA planted him in our city. But come on, we are American politics. You know, as we know, the paranoid style that has been written about by. Richard Hofstein.

Yeah, exactly. So we know that this is a, that is a lever that many politicians have tried to use, including the president of the United States right now, to try to divide people against their opponents, to make you afraid. I've already mentioned Willie Horton. And you can go through all the people that used appeals to racial solidarity or appeals to fear and security. So, and I've gone through it all. And in many ways, the best lessons I've got in my political career came from losing to Sharp James.

First time around. Yes, the first time around. You also work in the Senate every single day and have for a while. And your Republican colleagues have almost to a man and a woman stayed extremely loyal to not only Trump, but to Trumpism. Not only to the president of the United States, but the way he behaved. or quashas, subpoenas, or his rhetoric and all of it. What does that tell you that the number of senators or Republicans in general who have actually broken from the president really add up to a number of retirees? Yeah. Corker, Flake, sadly McCain.

I want to, I mean. But what does that tell you about that? What is going on? Fear, fear. Fear of what? Fear of their own jobs. Is the job that great? Well, I won't call. Yeah. Well, look. Look, I say life is about purpose, not position.

And when you lose that perspective and it becomes about position and not purpose, that corruption is at the sole level. And you should be willing to give up your position to stay true to your purpose. And that's what frustrates me right now. There's a reason why profiles and courage is such a thin volume. It's because I'll hear people talk to me in hallways, in private settings, about how outweigh, rate like give me, I'll give you an example, just a very pragmatic example. We in the Senate passed a bipartisan spending bill and then Trump comes in and says no. And he says, this is not the right thing to do and shuts the government down. That was one of the few days I heard

people saying, how could he do this? There was an empathy for lots of different issues that would be affected by this. But there is a fear. I'm sorry, but a fear of what? The same fear that had people who, after the Access Hollywood tape, withdrew their endorsement. And then when they saw how people turned on them, they put the endorsement back. You can't say that that's about anything other than your fear of your reelection, that you saw what was happening morally objectionable. And you removed your endorsement. And now you've changed your mind and put your endorsement back because you're afraid of losing your office. That's my problem right now. What does the benefit a man to gain the world and lose their soul. And that's my faith speaking. And I, I fully think we are in

that moment. Is Mitch McConnell losing his soul? Look, I think that this is what they might lose. I think this could be the moment where you see the destruction of the Republican Party as a national party. That this could be the Rubicon with which there's no going back. What shape does that take? It takes, number one, young people now are abandoning the Republican Party at rates that are astonished to become independence or Democrats in pretty dramatic ways. The demographic shifts. You can't run your party on racism and think you're going to get Latino, Asian, immigrant, African-American voters. The future of this country is a diverse, much more diverse future than the Republican Party base. I can't remember the overwhelming majority of Republican House

members. Look at it when you see the House split as white men. They're not even doing well with women. And by the way, you see women more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate. A state like Texas is on the verge of flipping permanently blue for presidential elections, not to mention Georgia, North Carolina, and I can go through other elections. The way they're conducting this party is contrary to what, I think it was 2013 in their autopsy, which they said the only way we're going to stay a relevant party is to deal with the issues that the majority believes in. The majority is with us on climate change in the Democratic Party, raising the minimum wage, common sense gun safety. I can go through the things that they constantly are putting themselves on the wrong. side of the people on because their narrow band of electorate and their corporate power brokers, corporate gun lobby and others are dictating to a party and are pushing them into a corner in which

they will become irrelevant on national elections in the future. Do you think that more people should have gone to prison for their role in what we now call the Great Recession? Absolutely. Look, we have a national criminal justice system. Whereas Brian Stevenson says, you get treated better if you are rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. And as a guy, again, that lives in a community where I see people going to jail for doing things that two of the last three presidents have admitted to doing. Remember,

George Bush and Barack Obama, it wasn't just some pot. Both of them did some pretty serious drugs. And yet lives in my community are destroyed. There are no difference between blacks and whites for using drugs or... Who should have gone to jail from Wall Street? Well, look, I'm not about to do what I think Donald Trump does mistakenly and tries to think that he's not only the executive, but he's the judicial branch as well. There's something called due process. But let's be clear, there was fraud, massive fraud going on, insurance companies rating trash as treasure. I watched my community being taken advantage of a mortgage industry that was immoral. And you remember these ninja loans where they were luring people into homes, giving them cash on signing. You get thousands of dollars

just for signing the papers. No, of course, but the Obama Justice Department, no matter what you think of Barack Obama did not prioritize going after those. And I'm telling you, if I'm president of the United States, the pharma industry, we should hold people criminally liable for perpetuating this, this opioid crisis. Like the Sackler family. If you are purposefully violating laws to do, to fuel what is lowering the life expectancy of Americans, yeah, there should be criminal investigations. And I find our, and this is something you know this from the beginning of my career, talking about the justice system and how dramatically biased it is where we have a different standard for different people.

And when my community, not just newer, when the larger African American, more marijuana arrests in 2017 than violent crime arrests. And so for the criminal, for the Department of Justice to somehow have a different standard for white college. crime, when I see people going to jail for theft at a smaller levels, at a desperation, by the way, I find that unacceptable. So one of my main missions of life, whatever position I hold, is to make, when we pledge allegiance and say liberty and justice for all, that we actually have a criminal justice system that reflects that. You've talked about how history will look back on the Trump administration. And I wonder how history will look back on the Trump administration and the Trump family, particularly the Trump family, in legal terms. We constantly hear about that there's

grift going on, essentially, that Donald Trump and his family and Confederates are profiting, making business of being in the White House. Do you see that? Yes. And I wonder what the Monuments Clause is all about. But we're seeing it coming out now about everything from foreign dignitaries understanding that, hey, we need to pay the president's business enterprises, stay in their hotels, resorts, etc. We see government expenditures in being used in making side trips to Scotland, so to speak. All of the stuff is not just despicable, but it's also, I think, a violation of our loss. You've known the Kushner family for an awfully long time.

How is your... 20 years. How is your view of that family evolved? Look, this is deeper in many ways than that for me. And it is a test in many ways for the principles with which I live my life. So when I needed to pass criminal justice reform and was negotiating to get that bill done, I'm proud to have led that in the United States Senate on the Democratic side, I still remember the battle to get the last thing I was trying to do.

force into this bill, which was a ban on solitary confinement for juveniles. I was negotiating with Jared Kushner, who I've known since I think he was 11, 12, 13 years old. Right. And just so the listeners know, the Kushner family has a real estate business not far from Newark. No, but I think the better in mind, they're more than that. I think the better thing to know is that this was one of the biggest Democratic party. They were fundraisers. Fundraisers. They were fixtures. And gave money to your campaigns. Gave money to every major Democrat in America. Right. They were number one on the DNC list. That's just a significant Democratic party, a set of people. But my experience with them was very different. When the whole state establishment was going in a different direction,

I had a meeting years ago, years of 2001, maybe, with Charlie Kushner. And he said, Jared's father. Jared's father. And he just said, I hear a lot about this guy. Tell me who you are. And he must have sat there and listened to me for 20, 30 minutes. And the more I talk, though, the more I thought this meeting is going wrong. It was going wrong in what sense? Because he looked so angry as I was talking to him. Just in general. Yeah.

And then at the end of the meeting, he just looks now like he's done with me. And he pushes some button or makes some call to his assistant and says, send in my business partners. And they sat down and he goes to them, we are about to make a really bad business decision. But this guy is a righteous man. And the guy he's running against is a blankety, blank, blank.

And he goes, I'm going to support you. And I want you to tell people I am. And he, it did hurt him. Because Sharp James blocked his appointment to the Port Authority and a lot of other things. Again, this is decade plus before what we know now. And I still remember when he got into his legal trouble. When you are in trouble in life and you've done things wrong, I just will never sanction bad behavior and I will speak up against it.

I don't care who you are. But I still remember still talking to him in prison and writing letters with him. And when he came out, I credit him with being a guy. that was so moved by what he saw in the criminal justice system that we went together to, this is again, way before. You saw salvation in them, in a sense. He took me to Rikers Island. You're talking about Charlie Kushner or Jared Kushner?

Jared's a kid, frankly. Okay. Takes me to Rikers Island. And first time, I'm a Jersey guy, and I meet with young black men to talk to them. And I still remember going around how long you've been here, six months. a year more, not even had your trial yet. And I was so angry when I walked out of there that it fueled me even more in my quest to end this mass incarceration and to see the torture because those kids, in fact, there's a very famous story

of one of them who committed suicide when he got out was in solitary confinement in almost for two years for stealing a backpack. And then eventually the charges were dismissed. And it's all as Kelly Browder. It was written about in The New Yorker by Jen Gonerman. Yes. And so, Caliph's story of the psychological harm that's done when you're in calutary confinement.

And to be there and witness that with other young black and brown people, I'll never forget that trip to Rikers. It made me more determined to end this nightmare. And the irony of that is I was sitting with kids that were in school. And flash forward to now the Kushner's. becoming Republicans, you know, the family's marrying with the Trump family. And fast forward all the way to me arguing with Jared Kushner about ending that practice that I saw with his father, a solitary confinement. And by the way, did that feel weird to you that you're negotiating with Jared Kushner, the son-in-law?

So at the end of the day, I'm a person of faith. And practicality. No, look, there's a Jewish phrase, gamzala tova. In everything, there is some purpose. Yes, some good. And so I don't question where God puts me sometimes, but I know I'm there for a purpose. And I don't know about this. Like, this is stuff of a novel to have me now the rivals, so to speak, in everything I'm trying to stop in the Trump administration.

But I will never, like, human dignity and vilification of individuals, wholesale. Like, you know, Lindsay Graham and me, like, God, there, I could. write a dissertation on my disagreements with Lindsay Graham. But when it came to that negotiating that criminal justice bill, he was on my side. I still remember him saying to the White House, give Corey Booker whatever he wants because you can't get this bill done without him. And so we are in this moment in American history where we are, I'm hurting and I'm angry, angry. But I will not fall into the trap. As my parents taught me, as my mom in Sunday school taught me, never let somebody pull you so low as to hate them.

But this is interesting. you were really rough on Joe Biden, totally understandably, about his relationship or the way he described his relationship with some segregation. No, no, no, it was more than that. And he thought he could, you know, you could find some common ground and all the rest. You were really rough on him. But that wasn't the reason. Go ahead. Because I think it's just that's some misreporting.

What I'm saying is how do you deal with people that are colleagues of yours in the Senate who may not be, Jim Crow is not available? to them, but you think of them not in the back of your mind, in the front of your mind, as stone-cold racist. Do you deal with them or you don't? So the Biden construction as a guy who has said publicly every major crime bill from the 70s till now, major and minor that passed through the Congress had my name on it. Now, picture me in 1994 when the crime bill was done. I'm a young black man.

Although a lot of black politicians and intellectuals were for those crime bills. However, it must be gotten they were. I'm not saying anything, but my experience growing up in America, we talked about it already. Sure. I had a very different experience as a 20-something black man in this country at a time that there was all of these people stoking fear and witnessed the mass incarceration that was going on of black men. And at the same time. Including the Clintons. At the same time, I met Yale.

watching people do drugs, sell drugs. There's no, there's just as percentage-wise, just as many black and white drug dealers. With impunity. With impunity. You know, I always say that the problem with, often with our experiences, is a problem is not a problem until it happens to us.

And that's a problem with empathy. That's, I think, one of the reasons with gun violence, which we can talk about. But I'm sorry, I didn't care Democrat or Republican. I felt the party and the country was portraying the truth. that we thought we could just throw people away, destroy lives. And remember, the war on drugs wasn't just a war on black people,

it was war on certain communities that where you now have one out of every two black men that were taken away from their families. Then now when they come out, it's a life sentence. You can't get a business license, can't work at a fast food restaurant because you have a non-violent drug conviction. And so, yeah, I feel some kind of way

about people that participate in that. But you know what? as a guy who lives the ideals of redemption, I was upset that Joe Biden would not come forward and say, I was wrong and just speak to the pain. I understand that, but how do you work now with people in the Senate who, in some form or another, you consider modern segregationists? Yeah, I, you, you, what do you not?

No, that's, you have to, you have to work with people who you fundamentally disagree with. But it's, it's more visceral than just, you're not disagreeing, with them on the margins of a tax policy debate. You're fundamentally morally, viscerally. Donald Trump signed my bill. I worked with him and his White House to pass a bill that liberated thousands of black people from prison. When we took the crack cocaine, powder cocaine disparity that they moved from 100 to 1 to 18 to run, which is still offensive, in my opinion, racist, they didn't make it retroactive.

The bill we got done made it retroactive. made it retroactive, liberated thousands of people, 90% of them were black. So tell that liberated person that Corey Booker should not deal with somebody that he fundamentally disagrees with on more things. That's the problem in this country because, look, Chris Christie, who I disagree with on a lot of things, he's not a racist in any way, but he's a friend, and I disagree with him passionately. But he was a governor of the state. I had to find, we had to find, we had to find common ground. He told me the story about how he lost 10 points in New Hampshire when he was running for president. Not any policy issue. They super PACs against him kept running a commercial

of him hugging Barack Obama. After the flood. But to think about this for a second, we're at a point in our country, we're hugging another human being, just touching somebody that's not in your tribe. We vilify each other so much. I felt this in a lesser way when I hug John McCain on the Senate floor. And the backlash on Twitter from people in my party for hugging a quote unquote baby killer was what some of the outrageous comments were. How often do you look at Twitter? I mean, now I don't. Honestly, I look at the tweets. I used to live on it. It was a platform with which I used constructively to help my city. What drove you away? Was there a morning that you went on and you saw something that just said, you know what? I think I'm not going to swim in these waters anymore. I think energy is so

important. And my own energy was sapped by it, yeah. Was just drained by it. Yeah. At seeing seeing, seeing, I think it's the challenge with, with my, with people who are in law enforcement and others. If you're, it is, you need to do something to protect your spirit and your soul. Let me ask you another criminal justice question. There's now a movement a foot, admittedly not, hardly a majority movement, even in the Democratic Party called the abolitionist movement, which is essentially, if not to clean out all jails and prisons completely close to it, the idea that the whole history of discipline and punish and imprisonment is misbegotten.

Where do you stand on that? Well, first of all, if you look at other successful models of incarceration around the globe, we are way out of step with our peers. By leaps. By leaps and bounds, what we do here is inhumane. shackling pregnant women when they're giving pregnant children in solitary confinement, which we may have gotten effectively going on the federal level, but it still goes on on the state level. So look, this whole field, the whole Democratic primary field is not going far enough for me.

We identified 17,000 people who are in prison, federal prisons right now, who do not belong factually if you just look at the case. And so let me give you an example of who some of these people are. There are aspects of the criminal justice reform bill that we passed that 87 senators said that this sentence is way too long and they adjusted those sentences down. And now you have the outrageous injustice of people with the same crime who have dramatically five, 10, 15 years, life sentence years further in a prison than somebody who committed the same crime. We should make those sentencing changes retroactive and give those people pathways to out of prison. So I'm very far in this field about what we should be. I know. But those are, with respect, liberal or reformist views of what we're talking about.

I'm asking a more radical question about the abolition. 17,000 people getting clemency is not radical. Out of millions. No, no, no. Federal prison population is not millions. Okay. But we have overall, in the state system and et cetera, we have millions of people who are incarcerated in this country. Yes.

And a crazily outsized proportion of them, of course, are black and brown. And poor. And poor. And mentally ill. We overincarcerate the mentally ill. We over incarcerate the addicted. We over incarcerate women. What do we do about this?

We radically change the ideas of crime and punishment in this country, that we emulate what works. Is there a foreign model that you see as attractive for the United States? There's a guy I knew from law school, Nick Turner, who runs an organization here in New York called the Vera Institute, who takes tours of prisons in other countries and has actually gotten people here in this country, wardens. to go look at other models and come back and change the way they're doing things. So there are a number of models that I hope that I'll be one of these presidents. And when I go to on state visits that visits prisons, it's part of my faith too. Did you visit me in prison?

To bring attention to the better ways of doing this. Because our society, while our infrastructure was crumbling, between the time I was in law school, at the time I was mayor of the city in Newark, we were building a new jail or prison every 10 days. there are more people in the south that are in prisons and jails than in college campuses. We now have more African Americans in this country under criminal supervision than all the slaves in 1850. We have created a destructive criminal justice system that's costing us more. In fact, Villanova University did an amazing compelling study where they said we would have 20% less poverty in America if our incarceration rates were the same as our industrial peers. So most Americans do not understand the self-inflicted harm it does.

And you shouldn't have to wait until you go to prison or some family members to see how injustice is, again, going back to the Charlie Corsioner story, empathy should not be created only when something happens to you. We should have a more courageous empathy in the country to understand that right now, as you and are having this conversation, there are children in solitary confinement. There are people who are addicted in desperate need of treatment. who are stuck in prisons and jails. There are veterans disproportionately represented in our jails and prisons who need mental health care. I can go through the shameful things going on in our society

that should prick all of our consciousness to make us all activists to end the nightmare of what is American mass incarceration. Senator, finally, the issue that seems to be the most divisive up on the debate stage anyway is not the environment where people are competing a little bit to see how much, how strongly they can get behind

this issue in terms of spending, in terms of imagination, and all the rest. But on medical care. Yes. And you have, certainly you have Bernie Sanders, who, as he tells us, wrote the damn bill, and Medicare for all is the rubric under which his position comes and to almost to the same degree, Elizabeth Warren. And then you have Joe Biden over here saying, basically what we need is Obamacare Plus. ObamaCare improved. I'm a little unclear. Again, I don't want to make this too simplistic, but I'm a little unclear on where you are in those polarities.

But it is simplistic, the way people are trying to break down. And I've tried to say that from the debate stage twice. So let me just first say, since I was a mayor, this is the wonderful thing about Twitter is now I have memorialized. My staff showed me tweets I was going up back then as a guy on the ground looking at this jaggedly broken system where I was saying, we should have a single-payer system. It's just this is so broken. We're spending so much more money. We're incentivizing all the wrong behaviors. I have people getting primary care in emergency rooms.

All the time. All the time. Broken system, dumb. Other countries doing it, getting better outcomes for far less money than we are. Now, let me just put on the hat of reality. Everybody on the debate stage believes we should have universal insurance coverage. In fact, I might be able to go as far as saying that everybody in that debate stage thinks that health care should be a right to all Americans. But the question is how you get there.

That's exactly right. Okay. So my belief that the best way to get there is Medicare for all, but I'm also one guy that will tell you right now that we're not going to get there right away that it's going to be a process. I think the best process is first and foremost doing common sense stuff to drive down prescription drug costs to drive down the costs to be in the system. But providing a vibrant public option first will help people, I think, as a first step to understand that we could deal with the hospital reimbursement rate. that people are afraid of right now. If we do to Bernie's plan, hospitals will collapse. We can begin to show that private insurers have a 15% overhead.

Medicare has a less than 2% overhead. So I just am a pragmatist. And as a guy that sees in my community people rationing their insulin, dealing with, as black communities do, disproportionately difficult health care rates, my community doesn't have time to sacrifice progress on the altar of purity. They need help now. They need progress now. They need affordable inhalers now. If I'm president of United States, as a guy who was a mayor, I'm a fierce pragmatist. Every day of my presidency,

I will expand health insurance coverage, get us closer and closer to the goal where health care in this country is a right and a reality for everybody. Senator Cory Booker, thank you. Thank you very much. Good luck to you. Thank you. Corey Booker is a candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2020, and he's currently the junior senator from the state of New Jersey. We spoke last week. I'm David Remnick, and that's it for today. Thanks for being with us, and if you've enjoyed the show,

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