The NPR Politics Podcast - 2020 Opening Arguments: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, & Amy Klobuchar

Episode Date: March 19, 2019

In the second of two episodes The NPR Politics Podcast analyzes exclusive interviews with the 2020 Democratic candidates. Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar lay out their vision for the United States. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, and political editor Domenico Montanaro. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, I'm Michelle from Lubbock, Texas. I'm Landon. I'm Grant. And we're about to go watch Big Brother Spencer play baseball on opening day. Well, Little League opening day, that is. This podcast was recorded at 1 23 p.m. on Tuesday, March 19th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this or by the time the game is over, let's play ball. I love them. They're so great, so enthusiastic and excited. And I am excited about baseball. I am excited about spring. Nothing says spring like baseball. Or the opening of the Media League softball.

Domenico and I had a 20-minute conversation about softball yesterday. This is a sore spot between the three of us. With the realization that Scott pointed out to me that I am now officially the oldest player on the team. But you've been the coach for three years, though. I have, yeah. So, figuratively, you were already the oldest. Well. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.

I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And we're here to talk about the opening arguments from the 2020 candidates. Yesterday, we heard from Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Pete Buttigieg. Today, we are going to talk through interviews that Morning Edition did with Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar. They are all senators. And each of them sat down with Morning Edition. And we have gone through these interviews and brought our favorite moments. Scott, you focused on Bernie Sanders, who was in conversation with Rachel Martin. Yeah. And let's just start out with the very beginning of the interview,

because Rachel got to the heart of the question we had about Bernie Sanders and his run this time. You lost the Democratic primary in 2016. So I heard. News you are no doubt aware of. But you have won a different kind of victory in that the ideas that you championed during that campaign, they are now part of the mainstream conversation on the left, in particular. Not on the left. They have mainstreamed for the American people virtually all of the ideas conversation on the left, in particular, healthcare. Not on the left. They have mainstream for the American people. Virtually all of the ideas that we campaigned on are now supported by a majority of the American people and an overwhelming majority of Democrats and independents.

So if we take the Democratic presidential field, you've got candidates now who sound like Bernie Sanders. So why do you need to run? Well, maybe the more appropriate question is why do they need to run? Yeah, and that's true. We've talked at length about how a lot of these issues, a bulk of the field agrees with Sanders. I think that question has been answered in the opening weeks of his campaign so far and that Bernie Sanders is off to a very strong start. He's getting big crowds. He's getting a lot of attention. He's raising a lot of money. And there's a lot of people who say even with the Bernie Sanders menu from a lot of other candidates, they're still interested in Bernie Sanders.

Much like people like McDonald's or they like their favorite restaurant. No, no. Maybe I shouldn't go that way. He's from Vermont. I think he would be upset with that description of that corporate food out of. But but they like that. They like Bernie Sanders. Yeah, it is not just about what he stands for. The people who support him is his most ardent supporters also like the person who is delivering the message. Anyone who wanted to dismiss Bernie Sanders as an also-ran from 2016 who lost and doesn't have a chance this time is sorely mistaken, especially given the level of money that Bernie Sanders was able to raise,

some $10 million in that first week, and the level of support that he continues to get. Now, there are some people who don't like Bernie Sanders because he's still not a Democrat. He ran against Hillary Clinton and a lot of the Clinton fans don't like him. There's all that is mixed in there, but he is still a top contender. So second point, Bernie Sanders is an unapologetic Democratic socialist. And we have seen and we have talked about the fact that one of the main attack lines against the Democratic field from President Trump and Republicans is this idea of a socialist takeover of the Democratic Party. Rachel asked about that and speaking about Medicare for all and some of his other proposals and the concern, does that open you up to attacks?

Here's how Bernie Sanders framed that. Well, it reminds me of some of my colleagues telling me about meetings they went to when they have irate conservatives standing up and says, get the government off of my Medicare. Get the government off of my Social Security. In fact, some of the most popular programs in this country are quote unquote big government. They are Social Security. Try messing with Social Security. People will not be responsible. Try messing with Medicare. Try messing with the Veterans Administration. Veterans feel very positive about that. That's all big government. Does private insurance go away? Yes, it does. Because you're not going to have a need for private insurance when, like other

countries, comprehensive health care through a Medicare for All program covers all of your basic needs now. He was so matter of fact about private insurance. It's gone. Yeah. And in terms of the political argument he was making, we saw a little bit of this in real time in the past decade of the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, very unpopular, big liability for Democrats. Once it was established and threatened, suddenly a lot of a lot of voters were very pro Obamacare. Let's put a marker on that. That is a radical idea, getting rid of private insurance in the United States when so many people have their insurance through the employer based system. And people tend to like their insurance when you pull them.

They like the insurance that they get. This is a huge sort of groundbreaking foundational idea, visionary kind of idea that when you look at the progressive young Democratic base, this is why so many of them were attracted to Bernie Sanders in 2016, because he wasn't going to be a quote unquote incrementalist. He was somebody who said, let's change American society. And here's how we do it. And the last thing, one of the things that I covered a lot over the last couple of years as Bernie Sanders was clearly thinking about running for president again, one of the things that I paid attention to was how is he positioning himself differently?

And I wrote a couple of stories on the fact that he was clearly going out of his way to develop a Bernie Sanders foreign policy, something that he totally ignored in 2016 to the point of, you know, regularly changing the subject when the issue came up. But he's he's given several speeches. He's put forward several proposals and he tries to kind of walk the line between the isolationism that President Trump tends to veer towards and the, you know, and the nation building type approach of American foreign policy at its most robust. So two moments. Here's the first one. I want to see us not engaged in never ending wars. I want to see us work with our allies

all over the world in fighting terrorism, in fighting authoritarianism, in fighting to fight against fossil fuels and the real dangers of climate change. That's the kind of internationalism I want to see. Then Rachel pushed him a little more into some of the specific areas where the U.S. is right now. We're currently in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, as you mentioned Yemen, Niger, Somalia, Libya. Are any of those a good idea? I mean, would a Bernie Sanders administration pull America back from that role as the world's police? I am not a great fan. I think if you look at the concept of

nation building, the unintended consequences have been horrific. Whether you think about the tragedy of Vietnam, which I opposed as a young man, or the war in Iraq, where the Bush administration lied to us. And I was one of the leaders in the House in opposition to that war. So I think we have to be very, very careful in terms of nation building, and our involvement in other countries internal issues. But you know, obviously, you're to have to look at every country in a case by case basis. You know, in some ways, that sounds like some of the things that candidate Trump said. It sure does, doesn't it? Sounds a little bit. There is a tremendous overlap of a Venn diagram between Sanders and Trump in some areas of economic and foreign policy. It's not the pulling away from NATO or pulling away from sort of global institutions. Yeah, I is the anti interventionism and that that obviously as president, although

President Trump wants to pull out of Syria, wants to pull out of Afghanistan, he hasn't actually done it. And and he also sort of flirts with the idea of going into Venezuela. I think I would disagree because while Sanders wants to take a more narrow view, he's also pro all these coalitions that Trump has pulled back from, pro aggressively addressing climate change and a lot of things like that. And I would also point out that, you know, not being opposed to nation building isn't the same as also taking some interventions in places. And Sanders said in that interview that countries have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. I don't think that means putting up a giant wall around the country to not intervene ever in other countries.

All right. We are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we're going to walk through the interviews that Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar did with Morning Edition. They're opening arguments after the break. We all have an online self, and sometimes that self can get us in real trouble. So what did he think he was doing? I don't know. I didn't know he posted it. Next week on Invisibilia, we visit a city that blurs reality and online noise with life or death stakes. And we're back. And let's talk now about Elizabeth Warren. I dove into her interview with Steve Inskeep. And I want to start with, I think, something that sets the tone for the whole interview.

In your mind, are you tweaking and better regulating the economy we have or fundamentally reshaping the economy? No, this is big structural change. It's big structural change in politics, big structural change in the economy, and big structural change in Washington. Big structural change. We are not talking about small ball here. And in fact, she has a lot of plans.

She's not just sort of talking about it. She's talking about it with specifics. Yeah, I mean, look, big structural change is a big deal, but it's also not the kind of structural change that, say, Bernie Sanders is talking about, like going into socialism versus staying within capitalism. She has a very aggressive approach when you're talking about regulations. tools of the U.S. government in an aggressive way, in a way that we have seen when both parties have been in charge, that it hasn't been fully applied.

Talking about scrutiny on banks, talking about regulation of Wall Street, things like that. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's like the difference between burn the house down and gut it and rebuild from the inside. She's not repainting rooms, but yeah, she wants to do a lot of work. She's knocking walls down and yeah, I mean, that's a yeah. And expanding and of the ways she's doing that in this interview with Steve Inskeep, she was talking about wanting to potentially break up some of the big tech companies. The example she uses is Amazon. So my proposal is just to say, look, this is kind of like baseball.

You can run the platform. That is, you can be the umpire or you can have a team in the game that is you can be pet pillows or amazon pet pillows but you don't get to do both at the same time because that's not a level playing field for anyone else so what i propose is platform will still be there you can come and you can still buy 27 coffee makers or whatever you want to look at online. But the competitors will all be competing straight up. Amazon doesn't get that special advantage from having all of this extraordinary amount of information about buyers and sellers that it is not sharing with the rest of the world. Meaning Amazon will have to sell off part of itself.

That's right. It breaks it apart. And that's true with Google and quite a of the world. Meaning Amazon will have to sell off part of itself. That's right. It breaks it apart. And that's true with Google and quite a few other firms. That's exactly right. But again, with Google, you can still look up the capital of North Dakota, but Google can't advance its businesses over other businesses that are trying to compete in that Google space. So Scott, she is talking about enforcing antitrust laws.

Yeah, and really updating them to deal with, which doesn't maybe seem like a radical idea when you say it out loud, to deal with the way that our economy has been driven for the last decade or so and really address the fact that so many people buy things, find information. The economy is really driven through just a small handful of enormous web companies. And this isn't the only issue. There are so many different areas, paid family leave, several other things

where Elizabeth Warren is staking a claim and forcing the conversation of the primary field. I am just so struck by how calmly she talks about all of these potential restructurings. You get the sense that she has thought about these plans for a very, very long time and is waiting to implement them. And this is another good contrast because I think, well, a lot of the candidates have the same broad goals. Like you said, Domenico, it's like, okay, and here's my 75 page paper on this that I could have given you three years ago if you asked for it. Or maybe 15 years ago. Some of this is in her area of expertise from back when she was a

professor and an advocate and a regulator. She ran the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, right? I mean, this is what she knows. So here's a line from this interview that really stood out to me. She says, I'm tired of freeloading billionaires. Sounds like someone. Yeah. I mean, it does. It does have a very Bernie Sanders-ish sound to it. And but she's not just tired of freeloading billionaires. She has a plan for relieving them of some of their wealth. How to make them not so billionaire anymore. And I said, look, you can have a lot of money. I don't have any problem with that. But I'd like to see you pay a wealth tax. That's 2% of everything that you own above $50 million. Pay that every year back into the kitty. And she, in this case, is talking about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos,

the richest man in the world. Which in his case would be billions of dollars per year. That's exactly right. In fact, it would hit this wealth tax, only the 75,000 richest families in this country. And yet, do you know how much money it would produce? 2%, 2%, 3% on fortunes over a billion. It would produce two2.75 trillion over the space of 10 years. And here's how I look at this. Jeff Bezos, you had a great idea. You got out there. You worked hard. And the other 75,000 families, you worked hard.

You had a great idea, or you inherited very well. But however it is that it happened, you have this great fortune. But remember, you built this fortune here in America. You used workers that all of us helped pay to educate. You got your goods to market on roads and bridges that all of us helped pay to build. You were protected by firefighters and police officers that all of us helped to pay for, and we're glad to do that. But what we're saying is when you make it really, really, really big, put a little back in the kitty so that the next kid gets a chance and the kid after that and the kid after that. This is a very familiar argument for those of us who covered the 2012 presidential campaign. This is the Barack Obama. You didn't build that argument that became the centerpiece of Republican attacks on him, which, of course, I guess didn't work.

You know, the case she makes is that the problems of income inequality are not related to Donald Trump. You don't really hear her talk about him except to maybe dismiss him. Right. She's saying that these are endemic and systemic problems that have gone on for a generation or more and that she has all these plans to fix it. Okay, let us go to the last candidate. This is Amy Klobuchar. She was interviewed by NPR's Rachel Martin. Domenico, you listened through to that interview. I did. Let's be really clear. When we're talking about Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, they're two of the most progressive candidates in this race and people who believe in radical change. They have a vision for the country that they want to enact.

This is not the case with Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. The senator is very much a legislator. And let's just get to this point of how pragmatic she is, where Rachel Martin, who interviewed her, asks, do you wonder if that'll help or hurt you in this race? I would hope that it helps me, because when you look at my record, I have stood up on so many progressive issues, whether it is choice, whether it is the environment, whether it is standing up for immigrants and against racial injustice. But there are moments where we can find common ground. Areas where I've done a lot of work in the middle are agriculture policy, things like public safety, working on issues like the drug shortage that we had in this country when,

sadly, kids with cancer weren't getting their drugs. So I worked out and worked with Susan Collins on that. Or I worked with Senator Hatch to get a billion dollars for school safety after the tragedy in Parkland. But that doesn't mean that I don't stand my ground. So while I was the lead Democrat on the school safety money, which passed overwhelmingly, I also was standing my ground against the president when it comes to universal background checks and an assault weapon ban. I sat directly across from him at that meeting, listened to him say nine times he wanted to get universal background checks done, and then saw him bow to the NRA the next day. That's just wrong.

So you see there, she's somebody who is trying to find this balance, right, between what she says is finding common ground on things like school safety, agriculture, human trafficking, she says later in the interview, versus standing her ground when it comes to some more progressive things, when it comes to gun control, climate change, things like that, when she feels like these big things might not be things that you can work with Republicans or the president on. approach to all of this. How many senators were just name checked? And if we go longer, I bet she could name check a few more. And that makes me wonder how this argument fares as soon as Joe Biden enters the race, who this is the this is like the the mission behind. This is the message behind his likely candidacy as well. I have been there for decades. I know everyone who gets things done. I can meet with Mitch McConnell and cut a deal. I mean, I think historically there's a big appeal of that, but I think both Republicans and Democrats, their base voters in recent years have not really loved the idea of somebody who's up

there to cut a deal and get 65% of what you want. It's not in vogue at the moment, it seems, even though there's a lot of people out there like Amy Klobuchar who say that's walking away from any sort of responsible governing strategy. You know, one other place where she's trying to strike this balance is on climate change. She talked about the Green New Deal, which she's called aspirational, but also noted that she is a co-sponsor. Listen to some of that. I think most people agree, including some of the primary sponsors, that we won't be able to get all this done in 10 years. But if we don't start and we don't capture the energy of young people that want to move on this issue, we're going to go nowhere because so far we've gone nowhere.

And again, you see there trying to make the case that, yes, we have to move in this direction. That's a very progressive direction on climate and what to do about it, but not exactly 100 percent sold on all of its tenants. Yeah. And I guess there is a question of whether that is good enough for Democratic voters, base Democratic voters, especially younger Democratic voters who care passionately about climate change and and support the Green New Deal or something like it. Yeah. And the top issue in the 2018 election and, you know, frankly, over the last decade, when we're talking about big things, has been health care. And, you know, let's listen to some of what she says will be her approach on health care, because it's a very pragmatic approach that,

well, some people might call incremental. we could get done. Then the public option in the first year, we should pass legislation for a public option that could be done with Medicaid or with Medicare. You could expand Medicare, you could expand Medicaid, but have a public option, which is the original idea that President Obama conceived. Why? Because then you would have a less expensive option for people to go to. That could result in a lot of people leaving other private plans to go to that public option. And Medicaid's an interesting way to do it. This is a bill that Senator Schatz, I was original co-sponsor, and I think Senator Sanders was actually originally on this bill as well in the last Congress. So many senators. If we drank every time she said Senator's name. I mean, I think especially hearing her

after we heard Sanders and Warren just highlights how different her approach is, right? And what this reminds me of is, you know, again, sounding like a broken record, the split between governing and campaigning. This reminds me a lot of the arguments that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders had in 2016. Like Bernie Sanders says, I want to do a $15 minimum wage. And Hillary Clinton says, what about a $12 minimum wage with a step up to that $15? We're all trying to get to the same goal, but my plan can pass faster. And she even cited a Patty Murray bill. Yes.

And a lot of voters didn't want to hear it. They just wanted somebody to say, I want a $15 minimum wage. And especially in a field with so many candidates taking whatever the $15 minimum wage version of any policy is, like, I wonder what the space is for this and how you get that message through. You know, one thing that I think tells us how far the Democratic Party has moved is that she is talking about a public option as a very sort of matter of fact idea is almost like an incremental step. And in 2009, a public option was a bridge too far. It was a government takeover of health care as far as Republicans were concerned. And was not politically plausible, even though Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate. But I think I think the party might have just changed since then.

I think there's a lot of a lot of younger voters, especially, who don't care and think that the party needs to aim higher. All right. That is a wrap for today. All the interviews with 2020 candidates you heard here came from NPR's Morning Edition, which is a radio show that also puts out a daily news podcast called Up First, which we are frequently on as guests. Now, we should say that these two episodes of the NPR Politics podcast, the one from yesterday and today, included interviews with Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Pete Buttigieg. Of course, there are many other candidates. And if and when NPR interviews those candidates, we will walk through what they have to say as well.

And to listen to more of those interviews, you can head to NPR.org. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.