The NPR Politics Podcast - 2020 Opening Arguments: Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, & Pete Buttigieg

Episode Date: March 18, 2019

In the first of two episodes The NPR Politics Podcast analyzes exclusive interviews with the 2020 Democratic candidates. Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Cory Booker, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg 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, this is Nina, and I am recording this as I watch the sunrise over the southern rim of the Grand Canyon. This podcast was recorded at 2.41pm on Monday, the 18th of March. Please note, things may have changed by the time you hear this. Thanks and enjoy the show. 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 thinking about the fact that for all the camping I've done, I've actually never been to the Grand Canyon, and it's a life goal. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor, and apparently you can't go down and back in a day. You have to camp down there.

All right, today, guys, we are going to do something a little bit different. Over on Morning Edition, which is a show on the radio, a show that we often appear on, they also produce a podcast called Up First. Over at Morning Edition, they've been interviewing the 2020 candidates about their opening arguments. They've talked to Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and many more. And today and tomorrow, we are going to do podcasts where we sort of talk through and listen to parts of those interviews. Today, we're going to focus on Harris, Booker, and Pete Buttigieg, who's the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Domenico, you've been listening to Steve Inskeep's interview with Kamala Harris.

Yeah, I did. And, you know, a few things stand out on the kind of opening argument she wants to make. You know, she talks about working families and economics, this Lyft Act that she has where she wants to give a $6,000 tax credit for those making $100,000 a year or less, talks about paid family leave, talks about climate change, legalizing marijuana, comprehensive immigration reform. But one thing really stood out to me in listening to her, and that's her focus on social justice. It seems to be the thing that she gets most fired up about. And she's against the death penalty, she says, because of systemic racism. And here's some of what she had to say about the death penalty.

I am personally opposed to the death penalty, and I applaud what Governor Newsom did. Is there a federal equivalent that you would do? Federal executions, of course, are quite rare, but there's a federal death penalty. I think that there should be. A moratorium, an end. Yes, I do. I do believe that. No one would be executed if you were president of the United States for any crime.

Correct. Not even, I don't know, treason. Not in the United States, no. There's nothing that rises to that level. Not in the United States, no. There's nothing that rises to that level. Not in the United States, no. So, Domenico, there is some context here. And luckily for you, you are sitting in a studio with two former Sacramento, California state governor reporters. Woo!

So, the death penalty, this came up because California's new governor, Gavin Newsom, put a statewide moratorium on the death penalty recently. And that's one of the reasons why Harris was asked about this. She actually has a pretty complicated relationship with the death penalty that has made all sides angry at her at one point or another. When she was a district attorney in San Francisco, she chose not to seek the death penalty for somebody who had murdered a police officer. That got a lot of heat and was a big issue when she first ran for statewide attorney general. But then as attorney general, she defended the statewide death penalty in an appeals case and made people who opposed the death penalty mad at her. So this, she was saying to Steve Inskeep that she would want to put a moratorium on all federal executions, not executions throughout the United States.

The thing that really stands out to me is that you'd be hard pressed to find someone in this field who disagrees with her, with the exception maybe of Joe Biden, which is a huge change from 20 years ago where Democrats felt they needed to be tougher on crime. In fact, that kind of leads me to the second piece of tape that I think people should hear. And that's sort of more generally what she talks about with her philosophy when it comes to social justice and the criminal justice system. I have always said of the criminal justice system and policy, we have been offered a false choice, the false choice suggesting you're either tough on crime or you're soft on crime, instead of asking, are we smart on crime? Instead of looking at the fact that the public health model has taught us, if you want to deal with an epidemic, crime or health, the smartest and most effective and cheapest way to deal with it is prevention first. If you're dealing with it

in the emergency room or the prison system, it is too late and it is too expensive. We have to be smart on crime. And Tam, if you have more questions about what Kamala Harris means by smart on crime, I refer you to her book, Smart on Crime, written 10 years ago. So she actually, which gets into- This is not her campaign book. This is a previous book. This is a previous. This is a book for a previous campaign. This is something she talked a lot about. But as we've talked about on podcasts before, she is facing the situation where the Democratic Party especially has gotten a lot more progressive on criminal justice than she has. So even when she was staking out this mostly progressive-ish claim as a DA, even that is not enough for a lot of people who have been asking real tough questions about her track record. You know, she also got to comprehensive immigration reform and saying that that's something she's in favor of, which also had the context around President Trump.

This administration has sought to vilify and scapegoat people coming from Mexico, period. And it is a crisis of this administration's own making. And I am not going to be duped by this administration into contributing to what has been an attempt to instill fear in the people of the United States. We should hold true to our values and what we say is our moral compass on the issue of people fleeing harm. Period. full stop. And what she's talking about there is having a process for people who are seeking asylum. Now, Domenico, there is one more thing that you came to talk about that stood out to you from the interview.

Yeah. I mean, you know, we've been talking about whether or not people in this campaign are pugilists or pragmatists, you know, are they fighters or are they seeking compromise? Right. And when it came to... Which is the Domenico brand term channeling Mara Eliasson, who always channels it down into a catchphrase.

I feel like this is your best catchphrase from 2020. Well, Mara and I talk about how our job is to come up with new cliches. Yeah. I'm complimenting. There's no shade here. We compete in doing that. I love it. And we talk about it and then we sign off on each other's cliches. Pragmatism versus pugilism.

TM. Copyright 2019. You're going to come out tomorrow. Anyway, so listen here at the very end of the interview where Steve is trying to wrap up. Steve is trying to wrap up, and her staff is actually trying to wrap up the interview. Someone in this interview couldn't let it go. Truly the last question. You mentioned Venezuela. I could go on with you forever.

Come on. I'd be happy to do that. That'd be fine. Okay. She said it. She said it. This is good. Your staff is feeling different.

Yeah, so he does go on to ask one more question. She says that she's kind of starting to get warmed up. She wants the fight. She wants the discussion. And she went on and made a few more points while her staff stood there thinking that they had things finished. So I think on the debate stage, this is somebody who, as a prosecutor, you're going to see want to take on the ideas. And that's something I've started to think a lot about because now June is closer than it was before. And we have all these candidates. We are up to 15. We might hit 16 next week.

Right. And they're all like like we've been talking about here. A lot of the policy is the same. A lot of the approach is the same. And they've all had their moment when they announce and then they're out meeting with crowds. But when they're all in the same place or most likely broken up over two nights and a random assortment of people like how do who makes that argument better who stands out more and that's something i think a lot about especially with harris i'm now imagining the set from laughing or something or maybe like celebrity squares or something where there's just like a giant stack of like box after row after row of candidate because they can't all fit on one level

on the stage or like the uh like the recording we are the World or something. Yeah. You can only fit nine in Celebrity Squares. Oh, well. Yeah, that's not even. We would need two Celebrity Squares. Two Celebrity Squares. All right. We are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we will walk through the interviews that Morning Edition did with

Cory Booker and Pete Buttigieg. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Jelmar, maker of CLR. For some of life's mucky moments, there's CLR. From soap scum to bicycle rust, CLR gets rid of household grime using natural ingredients, not harsh chemicals. It even carries the EPA's Safer Choice Seal. Use it to dissolve calcium, lime, and rust all around your house. Go to clrbrands.com today to learn more about how to keep your piece of the planet

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can take years. You end up with a 24 million digit long number. Ideas on the power and beauty of math on the TED Radio Hour from NPR. And we're back. And let's talk about Cory Booker, the senator from New Jersey. Scott, you listened to Steve's interview with him. And tell us what stood out. Yeah. And the theme of these interviews has been the idea of like,

what is your opening message? And for Cory Booker, for all the wonky policy, it gets down, it keeps coming back to this broad message of unity and love and bringing people together. And I think that's best exemplified by the super corny anecdote that he started off the interview with talking about the fact that that he went out and spent time visiting the farm of somebody who voted for Donald Trump. I met him at his door. He said, let me show you my my cows. And I made every corny dad joke that I love. Like, I'm going to loin a good lesson here. I know you find my jokes utterly ridiculous, but he and I started laughing and having a good time. And then we went into his home. That's too much even for Domenico. Even Domenico is groaning at this joke. I don't mind

utterly ridiculous. That wasn't as bad as like loin a lesson. Come on. Oh, but utterly ridiculous. I do kind of like that one. That's okay. Yeah. So here's what I got out of this. Like, right, like that's kind of Booker's basic premise. If we all talk to each other, if we all get along, we can maybe make some progress and find some practical solutions. Building a bridge with dad jokes? I don't know. But Steve pushed back on that and said like, OK, so say you're president and the other party. I'm just moving forward. And the other party just doesn't want to work with you.

What do you do next? We should note for the record that plenty of Republicans in the Senate have indicated that they like you. But what happens if it's 2021? You've been elected president of the United States. Like President Obama, you try to transcend partisanship. But the political reality of the moment, the political calculation of the moment for Republicans is they need to oppose you on everything. That's the only way they get back in power. You know, look, if I was going to surrender to cynicism about our nation in that way. I think cynicism is a toxic spiritual state. But I mean, it happened once.

What do you do when it happens? Yeah, but I went to Newark, New Jersey at a time that people were so disrespecting, disregarding that city. I mean, it was literally being made fun of by late night talk show hosts. And people told me, oh, we've tried these things before. It doesn't work. And we got incredibly creative. And at times I reached out to conservatives, brought the Manhattan Institute to help us with criminal justice reform programs because I saw I could find coalitions with Christian evangelicals, not on everything, but I found common ground and we got things done. gets into where this argument can come up a little short, because, you know, it's a two way street, right?

Like if I want you guys to cooperate with me, it's up to me, but also up to you, right? Like if you don't want to cooperate unless I force you to cooperate, unless I'm so powerful and popular that you feel politically compelled to, it ends pretty quickly. Well, and President Obama was hugely popular. You know, I don't know how many Republicans I talked to at his inauguration on Inauguration Day. He was hugely popular. Republicans, at least initially elected Republicans, were thought that he could get Republicans on board. They said no. Right. And immediately the grinder of Washington got to him where second term Obama was just talking about how the change has to come from outside Washington. He basically gave up on the idea of changing the ways of Washington. And Cory Booker wants to retry changing the ways,

I guess. So that gets to the last piece of tape that I want to listen to. There's been this interesting conversation on the campaign trail where a lot of Democrats, like Booker, are being pressured by voters and activists saying, if you become president and if Democrats retake control of the Senate, which is a lot of ifs here, will you get rid of the legislative filibuster? That's the rule that says you need 60 votes. So obviously some sort of Republican in most situations to move forward with the legislation. This is something that's been killed already when it comes to judges, Supreme Court nominations, cabinet picks. Why not just do it across the board? Interestingly, a lot of the senators, as progressive as they are

on so many big issues, don't want to do that. So that's something that Booker was asked about here. So suppose this Medicare for All proposal that you've endorsed, Bernie Sanders's proposal, passes the House, as it might well do, goes to the United States Senate, and Republicans feel it's socialism and filibuster it. Do you at that point, as the leader of your party, if you've been elected president, urge Democrats to get rid of the filibuster? No. I've heard some good arguments since February when people started getting into my face about, we've got to get rid of the filibuster. People on the left feel very strongly about it. I'm willing to listen to more arguments, but I'll tell you what, if we'd gotten rid of the filibuster, legislative filibuster in the Senate right now, women would have potentially lost their right to

make their own medical decisions. The kind of things they could have done in the first two years of the Trump administration would have been so damaging to people. And we need to understand that there's good reason to have a Senate where we're forced to find pragmatic bipartisan solutions. And again, I'm going to be out there in 2020, not just campaigning to win the presidency, but I'm going to be campaigning for people at every level of offices to hope that we get more Democrats elected. But I'll also be campaigning for this. Let's be a country that operates from that sense of common purpose and not let people twist us so that we can't do the things that we all agree urgently need to be done. So not as flashy as a pragmatist versus pugilist.

But I think there's a there's a split here of the senators versus the non senators, because while all the senators are saying, no, we need to keep it. Except Elizabeth Warren, who said she's open to the idea of getting rid of the legislative filibuster. You have some of the non senators like Governor Jay Inslee of Washington and Mayor Pete Buttigieg from Indiana. We're going to talk about next saying get rid of this. I'm just fascinated by the fact that on the campaign trail, what we hear continuously over and over again from Democrats is that they want to beat President Trump, right? They want someone who's electable to beat President Trump. And yet, at so many turns, they're also pushing these candidates to be in favor of things that in theory would make them less electable in a general election. OK, so it's my turn. I listened to the interview with Pete Buttigieg, who is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He has formed an exploratory committee to run for president.

He did an interview earlier this year with Morning Edition, a lengthy interview, but it was about his book that had come out of sort of his campaign book. So this wasn't part of the series of interviews about opening arguments, but we still get a pretty decent sense of who Buttigieg is and what he stands for. But first, we get a little bit about his name. It's an extremely common name in Malta and nowhere else, I guess. But yeah, any Maltese would recognize it right away. I think technically it would translate as something along the lines of Master of the Poultry. Now, of course, Master of the P of the poultry yeah that is very millennial for the millennial candidate like oh it's so common in this obscure place i didn't know i

might not have heard of i didn't know pete meant master of poultry oh of course we were talking about his last name buddha judge which we have all struggled to pronounce correctly and probably will continue to struggle to pronounce correctly um okay know, I think that there were a lot of themes in Buttigieg's interview with Steve Inskeep that are similar to things that you hear coming from Cory Booker. And in part, that is because Buttigieg is a mayor. Cory Booker was a mayor. There is a certain pragmatism that comes with being a mayor where you just have to get everything done. So as part of the interview, Buttigieg was talking about how there was a homeless guy who he was trying to convince to come in from the cold the day before. You know, in most years, a strong presidential candidate who talks that way technocratically would be a governor.

But the reason that they're not this year, for the most part, with Democrats, there are a couple of governors potentially running and running, is that Democrats got so wiped out over the Obama years in states where they could be governors or especially in purple states that they've really gone down to the mayoral level even to have people who are considering running. And we've gotten so politically polarized that it's almost a given that you live in a certain kind of state, you probably can't win statewide. And I think Buttigieg has been blunt that if he ran for senator or governor of Indiana, he'd probably lose. Right. So he's a mayor running for president of the United States. He, in this interview, also sort of talks about his effort or his potential appeal to what you'd call Trump voters. And he talks about how there are people who voted for him and for President Trump. You think a lot about people you encounter, and there are a number of them in our community who voted for Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Mike Pence and me. And one thing you realize,

of course, right away is it means that voters are maybe not as neatly ideological as a lot of the commentary assumes. It also means that I have to find ways to explain or justify my values and policies that will make sense to people who have different values. And what I found is it's not so much about inching closer to where others are or watering down what you believe. The important thing is people need to know that whatever it is you believe, that you came by it honestly and that you're serious about your values. You know, we don't have any polling on the margin of error for the subgroup that he's talking about of Obama, Trump, Pence,tigieg voters in Indiana. But if you think about the kind of message and the kinds of people he's trying to appeal to, he is someone who seems to be more focused on exactly the people

who were responsible for putting President Trump electorally over the finish line, those 70,000 people combined in Wisconsin, Michigan, and parts of Pennsylvania, something that really most of this Democratic field, frankly, has not been focused on. Which I think we cannot say enough that the amount of people who determined the 2016 election is so insanely small compared to the rest of the country. It really doesn't take much in one way or another to win them back for the Democrats. And you can do that by appealing in this kind of way. Frankly, you can also do it by just getting voters in Milwaukee and Detroit a little bit more excited about your campaign. Right. Like actually campaigning in those states and trying to get those voters, the sort of core based Democratic voters excited.

Yeah. I mean, what strikes me about Buttigieg in particular is his calm. Right. And his confidence that he seems to have, which kind of belies his years, right? He's 37 years old. He sort of fits in on our podcast cohort age. But he does stand out as somebody who seems to have a strong belief in his ideas and the vision for what the country can be in the future. And obviously, he takes that on to say because he's a millennial is one reason why, although he's on the older end of the millennial generation. I had one Democratic strategist say to me that they felt like Buttigieg is somebody who, if this were a radio and newspaper campaign, he'd be the nominee. But that once he's on TV and he looks so young and he's, you know,

on the shorter end that he might not look as presidential. That was one Democratic strategist view anyway. And I think the radio and newspaper thing, the point is he has a lot of substance. He's somebody who makes his case very well. We have talked a lot on this podcast about how candidates are going to talk about President Trump and how they are going to approach President Trump. And in this interview with Steve Inskeep, he talked about the idea that some of the people who are voting for President Trump and for Bernie Sanders in the primary were folks who just wanted to burn it all down. I think it will take years, maybe decades, to repair some of the institutions that

are being damaged right now. But we also need to recognize that you don't get a presidency like this unless things really are wrong. I mean, when you have the economy grow as much as it did, first under Clinton, then under Obama, and not see much of a change in real incomes, especially for lower and middle income people, especially in our part of the country, you understand why people become very skeptical of the system. And I think one of the things that really hurt Democrats in 2016, is you had people from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders, saying that the system had to be taken apart or changed in each in their own way. And the mainstream of the Democratic Party kind of sounded like we were the Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders, saying that the system had to be taken apart or changed in each in their own way. And the mainstream of the Democratic Party kind of sounded like we were

the ones saying the system is just fine. And that wasn't convincing because it isn't true. I think you might be suggesting that if the Democrats had had a less establishment message in 2016, they might have overwhelmed President Trump. Potentially. Yeah. I think, you know, a lot of the Democrats message became about him. And there were a lot of people where I live who were left wondering, OK, but who's talking about me? I think that's a great point. I mean, the fact is, a lot of people said that Hillary Clinton was somebody who, you know, wound up in reaction a lot to President Trump. In fact, one of her slogans was love Trump's hate. Right. And it's understandable. He was such a larger than life figure who said so many sort

of unorthodox things that she felt like she had to, you know, dissuade people from what his message was. But because of that, it wound up sounding like she didn't have as strong a, you know, an affirmative, affirmative message. So the pitch that Buttigieg is making is that it's time for a new generation to lead this country. I think the big issue has to do with intergenerational justice. I think that there is a question now of what kind of world this is going to be in 2054, which is when I'll reach the current age of the current president. And we have got to change the trajectory that we're on so that mine is not the first generation

to be worse off economically than my parents was. There is a huge urgency around issues from our fiscal and tax policy to climate change that needs to be front and center. And if there's one center of gravity to all of it, I think it's this question of the future. You know, this is a country that's undergoing huge generational and demographic change. It's what we saw as the cultural fissure of 2016, where President Trump was able to win. And you're seeing Democrats now try to figure out who they are. And these are just three of the people who are at least trying to make their message for what the party should be. Yeah. And we are going to hear from three more tomorrow. On tomorrow's podcast, we are going to talk through conversations that Morning Edition had

with Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Amy Klobuchar. They are all U.S. senators. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Tetra. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.