The NPR Politics Podcast - 2020 Opening Arguments: Howard Schultz, Kirsten Gillibrand, & Tulsi Gabbard

Episode Date: March 27, 2019

The NPR Politics Podcast analyzes exclusive interviews with the 2020 Democratic candidates. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard lay out their vision for the United States. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben 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

Hey everybody, my name is Ben and currently I am in Atlanta, Georgia, where I'm about to work my first ever event for a presidential candidate. This podcast was recorded at... Ben, that could be anybody! It's Wednesday, March 27th, 127 Eastern. Please keep in mind, things likely have changed by the time you hear this. Welp, the rally's about to start. Gotta go! I don't know if he's trying to be non-partisan or if he's not proud to work for this person. He just wants us to call him back.

Harris was in Atlanta, so we're on to you. We know your deal. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. Okay, so we are doing part three of our ongoing series now,

because we have three, so it's a trend. There's three. I think we can do a style section piece about this. That's how this works, right? Okay, okay. So if you have no idea what we're talking about, the other week we had two different episodes where we heard interviews that NPR did with Kamala Harris,

Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and A.B. Klobuchar. We are continuing that today. We have three interviews to walk you through with Howard Schultz, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Tulsi Gabbard. You guys ready? Let's do it. Ready as I'll ever be. So Scott, you interviewed Howard Schultz. You were out on the campaign trail with him. Why don't we take a listen to what you found? Yeah. Howard Schultz announced back in January that he's thinking very seriously about running for president as an independent, as a left-leaning centrist, basically, but not as a Democrat or a Republican, as an independent third-party candidate.

He was the longtime CEO of Starbucks, and I started the interview with a little joke about that. So you have kicked off a lot of controversy, a lot of very hardened opinions. And I'm speaking, of course, about the pumpkin spice latte. A plus, Scott. Feels like he didn't really love the joke that much. Did you ask him if he likes a pumpkin spice latte? I did not because I got the tone that he didn't really want to keep talking about it. When someone says, that's funny, that's not usually a sign they think you're funny.

Oh, I usually think it means they think it's funny. Oh, man, I need to re-remind. Domenico, I think people might have been telling you something. I hear that a lot. But two things out of that. First of all, the fact that he's exploring running as an independent has kicked off controversy. That blows out the controversy about whether or not pumpkin spice lattes are good out of the water. A lot of Democrats have been very upset saying this is something that opens up the door to split the vote.

But Schultz is making the case for himself that he has run a company that started with a handful of stores into one of the most recognizable companies in the world. He said that he did that while prioritizing things like giving health care to employees, helping fund college, doing a lot of social do-goodery type stuff while also making a lot of money. And his argument is, I can take that experience and fix the big problems the country has right now. The thing is, though, he thinks the Democrats running have too big of a fix for the big problems and that those solutions are extreme and veering on socialists to the point where he actually talks about Democrats more than he talks about President Trump when he's campaigning. Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris or Beto O'Rourke or Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, what kind of choice is that for the American people? First off, in my view, President Trump will get reelected. So this whole nonsense about me being a spoiler is a complete false narrative. The spoiler in

this race, if that were to take place, what I've just described, will be the socialist, democratic nominee who will not defeat Donald Trump. So all of those candidates you just mentioned, do you think that if they were elected, they would have a fundamentally different presidency than, say, Barack Obama? Completely. And what you're seeing every day is that in order for them to distinguish themselves from each other and maintain relevance in a very noisy political marketplace, they almost have to go left of each other. The further question that I want to ask Howard Schultz here is, are you more worried about the Democrats who you think are too far left, or are you more worried about Trump? I think that's a key question for him, because I wonder

if he thinks one is worse than the other, because if he thinks he's going to draw more votes away from one or the other, that very much changes whether or not he should be running, right? Well, we did talk about that. And he was going on about how he thinks that if somebody in the White House was pushing, as he calls it, socialist policies, that would lead to just a breakdown of the capitalist system. And he had a lot of concerns about that. He also kept making this argument that Democrats' ideas are too big and unrealistic. I think we could distill whether or not Howard Schultz is really more concerned about Democrats than or as much as he is President Trump based on what he would do.

I mean, did he say anything about what his priorities really were, about what his focus would be since this is the opening arguments? Yeah. And that's the thing. He goes on and on criticizing the Green New Deal, which he brings up over and over again. Medicare for all, you all, very high tax rates on the wealthy, which of course is something that would concern him as he is a billionaire. But when he lays out his own priorities, it's not anything that's really off the wall or entirely different than what centrist Democrats have been doing for a long time, particularly on healthcare. We went back and forth on healthcare, and he said his solution is shore up the Affordable Care Act, something that House Democrats are trying to do

this week, actually, and get insurers and pharmaceutical companies to sit down at the table with each other. I mean, that sounds a lot like the Obama approach to solving health care. One moment that was interesting to me is so he did this like event with voters. And then he went and spoke to a bunch of like tech CEOs from startups and it was really striking to me how much more animated and energized into the conversation he was like giving life tips to startups because like that is his wheelhouse what is the core purpose and reason for being of your business and everyone in the company has to understand that just like in a nanosecond what is the core purpose and reason

for being of this company? Everyone needs to understand that and know it. So I like thought it was a natural question of like, okay, what's that narrow focus for your presidential campaign? The core focus, as I just said, is a few things. And when you heard me talk today, I said, you can't have more than three to five priorities. You got to decide what's most important. Most important thing is first and foremost, let's restore trust and confidence in the government, in leadership, and in the Oval Office. And that is about being a servant leader, being in service of others. We must deal with the level of inequality in the country. We can't restore the promise of the country for people of privilege. We must restore the promise of the country for everyone.

So what I said today in my remarks was the American dream that I've lived growing up in public housing, that level of accessibility that existed for me and my family must exist again for every American family. Then we must solve systemic problems. We must solve the issue of immigration. We must solve the issue of health care in America. And then what I've been talking about for over a year is the national debt. That sounds much more CEO than it does politician, right? I mean, you look at some of the candidates who are leading this race and you can distill down what their campaign is. You can say Elizabeth Warren wants to unrig the economy. You can say Bernie Sanders has been and is about inequality and so on and so forth.

What he just did there is like a two page long mission statement, which is, yeah, which doesn't fit on a bumper sticker or campaign sign. It also sounds pretty left leaning. Sounds like someone with a list of center left ideas who couldn't get through this Democratic primary and decided to run as an independent since he has the money to do so. Yeah, right. Well, this is a big question I have. That's a great point is that, I mean, how much different is he? Yeah, maybe he's not as far left as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. How much different is he from John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado, who's kind of more of a centrist? Yeah. So, I mean, I think he's he's trying to to make this argument that, yes, I want to do all these things. And he kept coming back to the debt. But I also just want to, like, be a president who would take himself seriously and be be civil and kind of set a good message out, which, you know, you have heard Democrats try and make that argument not quite as bluntly as he is over and over again, but this idea of like restoring some sort of stature to the presidency as they

run against Trump. So when you distill it down and you look at his candidacy, what do you think in looking at what he's been talking about that is really the punch focus for him? I think it's kind of the approach that Barack Obama took a little bit toward the end of his term when he didn't have Democratic majorities in the House or Senate, making incremental change in the leftward direction, right? Like he's really anti the big blow up the system arguments that a lot of Democrats are making. The flip side, Pete Buttigieg told us last week, big ideas inspire people. Big ideas get people motivated. They set goals.

Schultz is more like, let's make some incremental changes. But again, it's hard to square that argument because he's also identifying all these massive problems. So it's like, here's a massive problem. Let's fix it incrementally. All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back and talk about Democrats, Kirsten Gillibrand and Tulsi Gabbard. Planet Money tip number 17. A great analogy doesn't have to make sense. Busier than a one-legged bobcat covering up his own crap on a frozen pond. Did you just make that up? Well, yeah. Planet Money, a poetic podcast about the economy. Okay, we are back. And up next, we're going to talk about New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, one of the first

Democrats to hop into the race for president, longtime senator from New York. And Danielle, even though a lot of women are also running for president, she has really focused her campaign on women's issues, right? Right. Yeah. But it's not just her campaign. It's her Senate career. One of the centerpieces of her Senate career, to be much more granular than just the broad topic of, quote unquote, women's issues, is she has made things like sexual assault in the military, sexual harassment on Capitol Hill, very central to her career on the Hill. Aside from that, you could call this more family issues. She has really pushed for, for example, paid family leave, as are, you might have noticed, several other people in the Democratic field. So she's not alone on that. But the thing is, in terms of her views,

since she was a congresswoman in upstate New York, since she became a senator, yeah, her views on some topics, for example, gun control and immigration, have shifted from more moderate to more liberal. And that's something that Here and Now's Robin Young asked her about. Could that really hurt her with primary voters? Here's what Gillibrand said. My values have never changed. But what I did change was my views on a couple very important issues. And I'll just take one on guns, you know, I came from a rural district. My mother didn't just cook the Thanksgiving turkey. She shot the Thanksgiving turkey. She has about eight shotguns, and it's part of the culture in upstate New York to have hunting

and to hunt for food. The mistake that I made and what I regret is that I didn't look outside my district, that I didn't look outside my district, that I didn't actually concern myself with concerns in other parts of my state or other parts in the country. And so I really regret it. So now I have a very proud F rating by the NRA because when I became senator 10 years ago, I started to talk to constituents all across the state, constituents in Buffalo, in the Bronx, in Brooklyn, communities that were suffering deeply from gun violence. And the truth is, when you meet a parent, a mother and a father who have lost their child to gun violence, it is crushing. It is soul crushing.

Certainly that is a criticism of her. But I think the thing that she can make a strong argument that she did there is that the shift happened very quickly and was consistent. She wasn't waffling back and forth. I mean, she's been in the U.S. Senate for, I think, a decade now, approaching a decade. And very quickly, once she became a statewide official, she kind of reset and stayed that way. But what she's saying is not only, yes, I am pro-gun control, but aside from that, I represent the people I represent and I represent them well. And that is very central to her message running for president, which is just as she said, you know, I represented the people of upstate New York. They had these particular views. So did I.

Then I broadened my view and I could change my mind. That is central, I think, in this interview to her view of what people who are more liberal. Like, you know, the whole that's like kind of the inverse of the 2016 election, where people weren't really looking at rural districts in the country. And it's a case that some of the other candidates, Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota, they make that case about the heartland, the middle of the country, because they're from there. And it's really interesting to see if Kirsten Gillibrand would go back to some of those roots to kind of talk about understanding rural America a little bit, because you don't really hear that from her now. So she is one of a lot of senators running, but she more than some of the other lawmakers has been talking a lot about bills she's actually worked on and actually passed. Did that come up? It did. And Senator Gillibrand, as you may know, has made some of her key issues on the presidential trail, as well as as senator, you know, sexual assault in the military, sexual harassment on Capitol Hill. And so actually, this was a response to what we were

talking about earlier. Robin Young from here and now asked her a question about whether she's seen as too progressive. What I do in Congress and what I've done in the Senate over the last 10 years is actually pass legislation on a bipartisan basis. And so, for example, you mentioned a bunch of bills, sexual assault in the military. The last time we got a vote on it, we got more than half of the Senate to agree on my resolution. And our bill is widely bipartisan. I have Ted Cruz and Rand Paul on our bill.

We just passed unanimously a bill on changing the rules for sexual harassment in Congress that was originally written by Senator Ted Cruz and I, or written by me, sorry, Ted Cruz and me. Let's get our diction proper. And that bill in its final form ultimately passed unanimously. She knew the NPR listener emails would be coming.

I mean, I appreciate someone who appreciates good grammar. So well done there. Well, OK, so sexual harassment and sexual violence in the military are two things that she's obviously had a prominent role in and been pretty well known about and actually kind of launched her into the conversation about potentially running for president before we all started really talking about some of her positions. That's what she was known for. But what about her role in the Al Franken scandal and the fact that she was such a leading voice in pushing him out? And that's something that a lot of Democrats, donors and activists have actually kind of turned on her about. While they cheerlead, you know, people being fired or ousted for sexual harassment. Yeah, there's this pushback for her for pushing back against somebody who they happen to like who who was accused of. Right. But yeah, like

listening to this, that is a cloud hanging over this answer. You can almost see it there, right? Because that is something that, yeah, some Democratic voters really still blame her for. There's plenty of argument whether that's right. But what she seems to be trying to do here is saying, yes, this is my signature issue, but you don't need to see me as being super progressive on it. I can build consensus on my signature issue, as I did with, for example, Ted Cruz. So I do bring people together on things that might be seen as progressive. In response to another question, Robin Young asked her about, OK, so what do Democratic voters, what do you think they want in terms of diversity? What kind of a candidate do they want?

And so I think what the electorate's looking for is someone who's running on conviction, on what they care deeply about, on their passion with authenticity. And I think as a mom of young kids, not only do I have shared values with people all across America, but can find the common ground that is desperate. Right now, this country has been torn apart by President Trump. He's divided us on every racial line, every religious line, every socioeconomic line. And in fact, what we need more than anything is someone to bring us back together. In Domenico, one of the ways that Jill Brand has recently tried to start distinguishing herself is trying to take Trump head on in a way that other candidates aren't, to the point where when she made her official kickoff announcement, she did it directly outside one of his hotels in New York City. And unfortunately for her on the same day that the bar letter was released, literally almost at the same time. And, you know, it may be a metaphor for

some of her candidacy because really got overshadowed. And I think there are a lot of other candidates in this race who've been overshadowing her in some ways. All right. So third candidate to get to is Tulsi Gabbard, congresswoman from Hawaii. Dominica, this is yours. Yeah. I listened to Tulsi Gabbard's interview on NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio by Peter Bielo. It's fascinating. And, you know, she's somebody who she's congresswoman from Hawaii. She's running for president after having backed Bernie Sanders pretty strongly in 2016. Well, Bernie Sanders is running again. And she was asked why she is running this time, how she differentiates herself from Sanders, and also what she would say on a debate stage for what her argument is. I'm a soldier. I know the cost of war. And as president and commander in chief, I'm committed to changing our foreign policy and making it so that we are ending these counterproductive, wasteful regime change wars, working to end this new Cold War that we are in and nuclear arms race and bringing those trillions of dollars back to serve the needs of our people and making sure that we've got health care for all and making

sure that we are providing the kind of support and funding to our education, to our kids and to our teachers, taking care of kids who are needing special education and assistance, investing and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. We have so many different urgent needs that our people have. I'm committed to bringing about that change to meet those needs. You know, she served as an army police officer. She was stationed in Iraq. She is in the Hawaii National Guard now as well. So she really does come at this from kind of an anti-war stance and believes that the country is spending too much money on the military and the Pentagon. And she believes that that money that's spent on the military and the Pentagon should be redirected to other domestic issues. Does she have particular domestic issues that are at the top of that priority list? She doesn't think student loan lenders should be profitable. She believes that there should be a $15 minimum wage, just like a lot of other Democratic candidates. She doesn't distinguish herself as much on those issues as she does and comes back to repeatedly to the military, her military service, but also how much she thinks that the U.S. has gone too far with especially regime change in other countries. That's probably what she was best known for before this run, right?

This mix of I'm a veteran, but I'm very anti-overreach in foreign intervention. I mean, to the point where didn't she go to Syria and meet with the Assad regime? Yeah, and what's fascinating about that is she said that as a result of that trip that she took, that she leans pretty heavily against economic sanctions because she said that she believes that it hurts people in those countries. She said that, for example, she saw women in Syria who were trying to open a small business and they had to sort of run a cash only black market business because they couldn't open a bank account and trade across the border. Speaking of that Assad trip, she defended herself in this interview. She was asked specifically why she took that trip. In the pursuit of peace, with an understanding that unless we are willing

to have those conversations, unless we are willing to pursue that diplomatic path, meeting and talking with, whether it is adversaries or potential adversaries, the only alternative to that is more war. I got to say that, to me, what seems like the big question hanging over her campaign is if this is an issue she can get away from. If you were to ask me, hey, what are the top five things you know about Tulsi Gabbard? I would have told you, oh, she met with Assad. It would definitely be one of them. And I think that's probably those voters who do know of her. That is one of the things they know. for someone of your own party to go and do that and seemingly undermine your foreign policy. That's going to be a difficult thing for her to have to get through in a Democratic primary.

Yeah. And we should point out that was the issue because like, you know, Secretary of State John Kerry met with Assad when he was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. A lot of other people as well was the fact that she kind of did it on her own that that that caused a lot of controversy. You know, speaking of controversy, another thing that she was not asked about in this that we should probably mention that's going to be a difficult thing for her to get over in a Democratic primaries, her views on LGBTQ rights. She's since apologized for this, but she had previously touted working for her father who ran an anti-gay organization that promoted conversion therapy. And, you know, she says that she's apologized for that. She served in the military and she served with people of all different stripes and backgrounds. And she says that she's now pro-gay rights.

Dominica, what's one last thing from this interview that jumped out to you? Well, the other thing that stood out to me was the way she talked about immigration, which is in a very nuanced way. And I want you to listen to one clip and then out of it, I want you to tell me who it sounds like. Border security is a reality that we have to face that as a country, our borders need to be secure. Otherwise, we don't really have a country. And so how would you go about securing them? By looking at what's the best technology, what are the best ways that we can make sure that our borders are secure?

Does that include a wall? There are certain places along our border that already have some form of a barrier. There are other places along the border where it makes absolutely no sense to have a wall or a barrier of any kind. So? Without borders, you don't have a country. It's not a little bit like President Trump, though. He also says without steel, you don't have a country. Right. Well a little bit like President Trump, though. He also says without steel, you don't have a country. Well, OK, so it's a little on the nose.

Right. But the idea here is that she's a little bit more moderate sounding when it comes to immigration. She chalks that up to her her time in the military. But she is in favor, for example, of comprehensive immigration reform, of helping asylum seekers and dreamers. But she's not in favor of abolishing ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which had become a big thing for many on the left. She said it's not about the agency. It's about the policymakers and the policies they put in place. All right. So that's Tulsi Gabbard. And earlier we heard from Kirsten Gillibrand and Howard Schultz, three people all trying to be the next president of the United States. This is the third podcast that we've done on stuff like this. If you go back in your feed, you can hear interviews we did with Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and other candidates. And we'll certainly do more of these podcasts as more interviews come in with either us or other NPR shows. That's it for today. We'll be back in your feed as soon as there is news. I'm Scott Detrow. I

cover Congress. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.