Today, Explained - What are Democrats doing even?

Episode Date: July 13, 2018

Republicans control the White House, Congress and most state legislatures. Pod Save America’s Dan Pfeiffer explains how Democrats can dig themselves out of this hole. ************************************************************* CORRECTION: In this episode, we incorrectly state that the majority of white millennials voted for Donald Trump. Trump won the youngest white demographic (ages 18-29), but he won a plurality (47%) not a majority. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, Sean. Hey, Brie. You're back. I am back. But you're outside and I'm in the studio. Should I come in? No, because you had the mono. I thought I'd call you from here. Oh, okay. Not offensive at all. Did you take an Uber?

You know what? I did not. I took a train. But you did remember that Uber is moving forward and listening to feedback so they can improve and get better with every trip and that they're building new features to take the stress out of your pickup and working on ways to keep you better protected and connected throughout your ride. And you can find out more by going to Uber.com slash moving forward. I will always remember. We talk about Republicans a lot on this show, on account of the Republican president, the Republican-controlled Senate, the Republican-controlled House, and Republicans controlling a majority of the state legislatures. But what are the Democrats up to? Do they have a plan heading into the midterms that are just a few months away? I asked Dan Pfeiffer.

I am a card-carrying member of the Democratic establishment. I am an institutionalist. I worked for the Democratic leader of the Senate. I worked for senators. I worked in the White House for six years. He was one of President Obama's senior advisors, and now he's a co-host of Pod Save America, which has become one of the biggest podcasts in the universe.

I think the biggest mistake that too many Democrats are making is that they think the best path to victory is to try to win over swing voters as opposed to turn out voters who didn't turn out. And the reason that's a mistake is it's a false choice. Because if we make our progressive arguments with reason and with passion, we can do both. Dan Pfeiffer, the title of your new book is Yes, We Still Can. Who is the we in that title? America.

All of it. I mean everyone. I mean that we can have a better politics than we currently have. A lot of people rallied around that message and your former boss, Barack Obama, years ago, but what about now? Do the Democrats lack a certain cohesion without Barack Obama? Yes, but I think that shouldn't be shocking. I think anytime a party is out of the White House, there's always going to be a question of who's the leader, right? I mean, who was the leader of the Republicans when Barack Obama was president? There wasn't a real answer to that question either.

So like, where do we go? You know, so much of the Democratic policy party agenda was built around two things before Obama came into office. Long held ideas we had not gotten done, like universal health care, and undoing the worst things that Bush had done. And a lot of that agenda got done under Obama. So we have a lot of things to figure out for sure. And when you say we, this isn't the yes, we still can. No, no, this is we the Democrats. Yes. We America have a lot of work to do. In this context, the pronoun we means we the Democratic Party. Not to pick on any one Democrat, but I was listening to NPR the other morning and Senator Chris Coons from Delaware was being interviewed by Rachel Martin.

And they started talking about NATO, but the conversation drifted to Trump's Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh. Of course. Why wouldn't it? Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, the question posed was, you know, are you going to oppose his nomination? Our job on the Judiciary Committee is to consider a nominee carefully and thoughtfully, to read into their background.

We don't have the information on Judge Kavanaugh yet. So you haven't decided to vote no unequivocally? I will tell you that I am leaning against Judge Kavanaugh, given what I know so far about his decisional record. But I've known Brett nearly 30 years. And it just seemed like a really wishy-washy answer when Mitch McConnell didn't seem wishy washy at all about Merrick Garland. Like, do the Democrats still have no idea how to play this game? Some do, some don't. Mitch McConnell, he actually opposed Merrick Garland before Merrick Garland was even named. Right, exactly. Bob Casey, Senator from Pennsylvania, put out a statement before Trump even announced who the

pick was going to be. And he made a strong case why he would oppose whoever Trump picked. Right. He's not from California or New York. He is a personally pro-life Senator from a state that Trump won. Yeah. This is why he's been a very successful politician in a tough state. You're always at your best when you are making an argument. And if you make it authentically and passionately, you will do well.

So what do you think the strongest arguments being made in the Democratic Party are right now? Here is this president who may be one of the most divisive in a... I don't need to hedge that statement. Yeah, you sound like a Democratic senator there. Here's the most divisive president we've had in a lifetime. How hard could it be to come up with a strong set of arguments against him? This is actually the real trick of Trump.

There's this thing in campaigns where you call that message box. And it's basically you write in one quadrant your positive argument for yourself. And then you write your opponent's positive argument for yourself. And then you write your opponent's positive argument for themselves. And then the bottom quadrant, you write your negative arguments to your opponent and your opponent's negative argument against you. It's how you understand the contours of the race. And so I would ask people this question, what's Trump's argument for himself? Everyone would say, MAGA, Make America Great Again. It was very resonant. I would ask them what Trump's argument against Hillary was, and they would all shout something like, crooked Hillary. And then I would ask people, what is Hillary's argument

against Trump? And the room would explode with 50 different things. Right. Racist, misogynist, unfit, corrupt, liar. But there were so many of them, you can lose the forest for the trees in that situation. Matthew Iglesias here at Vox wrote a great piece recently about Democrats returning to poetry again after the prose of Hillary Clinton's campaign. Democrats are campaigning now on very simple, poetic ideas, Medicare for all, abolish ICE, even if these ideas aren't practical, aren't attainable. Is that part of what you're talking about? Democrats should campaign on what we would like to see happen policy-wise,

not what we think is feasible within the current political structure. And I think that was a challenge for Hillary Clinton against Barack Obama in 2008, is she is a sincere policy wonk. We would have these ideas of things we want to do, and they would call us naive and say, you'll never get 60 votes for this. And we scoffed at that, and voters scoffed at that, because you should argue for the ideal, not for the possible. I think there is a freedom for Democrats now, right? So you take abolish ICE. There's not really a second sentence to that. There's a very legitimate, serious policy argument about that the way in which we've organized our immigration enforcement resources in this country is completely ass backwards. The conduct that we see from ICE, weaponized under Trump, but even under President Obama,

is troubling, and that the decision to separate ICE from INS was a mistake. That is what people mean when they say abolish ICE. It's not just, we're just going to stop enforcing the law. Like we should reconstruct this to make it better. But some people hear abolish ICE and they definitely think that means get rid of ICE. That's the thing about these slogans. They can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people.

So maybe someone says abolish ICE with this intention to shift the Overton window and change the conversation. But certainly people using that hashtag on Twitter or on Instagram or on Facebook genuinely hope that someone's going to abol, bold ideas that have political risk to them and have sort of been untested on the debate stage, you were doing interviews, you're on this podcast, you need more than a hashtag, right? You're going to have to answer the follow-up questions to it. So you're going to have to have a policy that undergirds it. What about someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? I mean, she doesn't have the same stakes as, say, a presidential candidate, but she even took a trip down to the border and still maintained this abolish ICE thing, even though ICE isn't really the issue at the border. It's a little misleading.

She may have even slightly gotten it wrong. I don't know about her border trip. I didn't follow that closely. I think her campaign was incredibly impressive on a whole host of levels. It was a campaign of moral clarity, right? These are the things we're going to be for and we're going to argue for. I remember a time in the 2008 campaign, Bill Richardson took a position on Iraq that was very popular with the left. I'm not just advocating a withdrawal. I'm advocating a withdrawal with a plan. The difference between me and the other candidates it are zero if you don't win the election, right?

And Obama wouldn't do that because he thought there's a chance he'd win and he didn't want to have to reverse that position. And so I think presidential candidates are going to be forced to put some meat on the bones of what these things mean. Aside from the meaning of these slogans like abolish ICE or Medicare for all, I wonder what you think of this shift leftward that's happening right now. What's the significance of Ocasio-Cortez's primary win? Is the future of the Democratic Party more socialist? We just don't know enough to know what it means, right? Everyone has tried to apply her win to their narrative of choice. If your narrative of choice is the Democrats are in disarray,

then her beating Joe Crowley means we're having a Tea Party-like revolution in the Democratic Party, and all the party leaders are at risk. And maybe that's true, but you have Kevin DeLeon, a very serious person here in California, challenging Dianne Feinstein, and she got like four times the number of votes he got, in the primary at least. I mean, the party has definitely moved in a populist leftward direction for a decade now. Those ideas have real currency with a broad section of voters, including many of whom who voted for Donald Trump. Her sort of stardom coming out of it does speak to a desire for a next generation of authentic leaders who campaign and speak from the heart and don't sound like typical politicians.

Dan Pfeiffer says the we in his book titled Yes, We Still Can is everyone. It's about how America can have better politics. But is his super big, successful, partisan podcast, Pod Save America, helping or hurting that cause? I'm going to ask him in a minute. This is Today Explained. So what's it like out in the kitchen at Vox? How does it feel to be back? My fellow intern, Catherine, is here. Oh, hand her the phone for a second. Okay, cool.

Hey, Sean. Hey, Catherine. I just want to tell you that Uber's turned the page and is moving forward. The company's goal is to improve the experience for both riders and drivers. They've been listening to feedback and working on ways to keep you better protected and connected during your ride so they can get better with every trip. And you can find out more by going to Uber.com slash moving forward.

Hot diggity. I'll have to do that. Great. Could you hand the phone back to Bree for a sec? Yes. Hello. Hey, did you listen to the Arthur Brooks show yet? The new podcast I told you about yesterday? No, I did not. Hey, did you listen to the Arthur Brooks show yet? The new podcast I told you about yesterday? No, I did not. Oh, why not?

Oh, because I was recovering from my last day out of work. Because of Mono. Yeah, instead I watched the Explained, the episode on Explanation Point. Oh, that's great. But we're promoting the Arthur Brooks show right now, Bri. Well, I can't keep up, man. the episode on Explanation Point. Oh, that's great. But we're promoting the Arthur Brooks show right now, Brie. Well, I can't keep up, man. You and Jon Favreau came out of the Obama administration where the guiding philosophy was, you know,

yes, we can bring people together, reach out across the aisle on some occasions. Periodically, yes. When possible. And since then, of course, you've started this podcast that does a lot of sort of like liberal calls to action. It seems to very much be for the left. Do you feel like that was just the imperative

of this political moment or was that just what y'all wanted to do? Both. I still believe the best message for a Democrat in 2020 will be one that speaks to the better parts of America. It should be incredibly tough on Trump. It should be tough on Republicans for enabling Trump, but that the American people in America, the country, are better than this. And so I think an uplifting message is still the right thing to do. We have this podcast because we were looking, Favreau, Tommy, Lovett, myself, looking for ways to be in politics still. We wanted to find a way

to explain the news to people based on our experience with all of our biases completely on our sleeves in every way, shape, or form, but also help tell people where they can make an impact. That is consistent with Obama's message of grassroots activism. Barack Obama aspired to, and we still aspire to, a country where it's not just red states and blue states. But right now, we got work to do as Democrats, and we are in a dangerous place, not just for Democrats, but for democracy. And we are the majority. There are more of us than them. And if we can just get people to turn out to vote, then we can take this country back. I just wonder if the sort of like us versus them, they're kind of a lost cause. This is about this group of people. This is about activism is sort of at odds with the like, yes, we can of Obama's initial campaign.

I see no dissonance between what Barack Obama ran on, what he talked about, what we do on the podcast, what's in the book. I think they are wholly consistent. It may sound different at times. We may be a little more unvarnished in our... You guys talk a lot of shit. Yeah, we do. But it's like we are in the business of engaging people. Okay, but here's one. You guys advocated shutting down the government. We don't have a choice. We have a moral obligation to stand up for the Dreamers, and we have a political obligation to have the fight. We didn't ask for the fight, but it's before us. And if we walk away from it, it's going to have real consequences for

the people who will be marching on the one-year anniversary of the Women's March. And if we don't give them a reason to believe that having Democrats in charge of the Senate will get us better outcomes for something as obvious as fighting for the dreamers, then we will be hurt in blue states and in red states. Would Barack Obama have done that? Would he have endorsed that? My guess is no. Look, we're not going to agree on every strategic or tactical move, but I, I haven't, I didn't ask him that question, but he probably wouldn't have. I learned some lessons about just how little the Republicans cared about the issue of immigration and about the willingness of the red state Democrats to stand up for these things. Maybe that wasn't the right move. I don't know. But at the time, we were like, if you are worried about 800,000 dreamers being deported

from this country, and this may be your best chance to fix it, that's why we argued for it. I don't know what Barack Obama would have done there. Maybe he would have done something totally differently. We've had disagreements over the years. Between 2007 and 2017, he was the decider. Now we know we have a podcast. I just wonder, you know, for all the people who want American politics to be less toxic,

is there a toll that advocating, say something like shutting down the government, that just turns people further off American politics? I get that. I totally understand that argument. But our founders envisioned a two-party system with two responsible parties. Right now, we only have one, and it ain't the Republicans. If Robert Mueller were tomorrow to produce a report that included smoking gun evidence of Trump working with the Russians to steal the election, the Republicans would do nothing. Maybe Jeff Flake would send out a sad tweet. They would do nothing.

I wonder, I mean, when you talk about like the one party that is responsible and obviously the other party that isn't, part of these children being detained at the border has to do with policies that Barack Obama either put in place or didn't change, right? We tried to change them. We tried to change them legislatively, and we passed it out of the Senate with 68 votes, I think. And then the House refused to bring that bill to the floor, even though John Boehner knew that if that bill was put on the floor and people were allowed to vote their conscience,

it would get 300 plus votes. But he couldn't do it because he didn't want to upset the racist wing of the Republican Party. Look, were we perfect for immigration? Far from it. Did ICE and other enforcement agencies do really terrible things? Sure. But did we try to fix the problem? Absolutely. And the Republicans instead are trying to weaponize the problem. And the very specific problem, child separation, is a policy choice that Donald Trump made that Barack Obama and George Bush refused to make because they thought it was cruel and immoral. You write in your book about how you think Barack Obama may have been elected too soon. I'm wondering if you can sort of explain that. Sure. So in the book, it's a night where we are traveling home in the run-out to the 2014

elections after we were out campaigning, Obama was reflecting on the fact that it was inevitable that America would have a president who did not look like the previous 43 presidents, who was not a white male. That may have happened sooner than would otherwise have happened because he was the exact right person for the moment, right? America was looking for someone who would oppose the Iraq War, who was outside of Washington, and was inspiring to young people looking for a new leader. And he happened to be named Barack Hussein Obama, a black man in America. At the same time that happened, America went through a massive transition, huge economic disruption that quickly unraveled many parts

of the middle class bargain in this country with the financial crisis. In the middle of a huge demographic shift as the country is getting browner very quickly, that had an impact. I think it primarily had an impact on the other side who saw a political opportunity in sowing racial division for the purpose of getting votes. I mean, thinking about how the country's got white supremacists and Nazis openly running for Congress right now, I wonder if Barack Obama maybe came too late, if he couldn't get elected in 10 or 15 years. I think probably the opposite. I think millennials are going to be the people who run this country, both as the decisive

voting bloc and our leaders in a not too distant future. And they have very different views about diversity and race and inclusion in America than Donald Trump does. But the majority of white millennials in this country voted for Donald Trump, right? For Democrats, things look pretty bleak right now. What would you say to young Democrats who see a really strong rightward trend right now or a president who refused to condemn white supremacists in Charlottesville and despair? You should feel into despair. It's terrible. You have two choices with that anger or that despair is you can crawl under your desk and give up or you can do something to fix it.

Right after Donald Trump was inaugurated, I stumbled upon an Obama speech that I really like, but it's sort of forgotten about, which was the speech he gave on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. The March on Washington teaches us that we are not trapped by the mistakes of history, that we are masters of our fate. But it also teaches us that the promise of this nation will only be kept when we work together. Is electing a Democratic Congress in 2018 and a Democratic president in 2020 going to solve all the problems in this country? No. Will the people who marched in Charlottesville, will they still

be around? Absolutely. But it's a start, and it at least sends a message that that is a losing brand of politics. I believe, as I sit here today, that it could be very compelling for a Democratic candidate to be an optimist and a unifier that says that America is better than the division, is better than the racism, and that calls for America to aspire to better things. It could be very successful. That could be a very appealing message. Dan Pfeiffer is one of the hosts of Pod Save America. Near the end of this episode, I incorrectly stated that the majority of white millennials voted for Donald Trump. According to CNN, Trump won the youngest white demographic, ages 18 to 29, Near the end of this episode, I incorrectly stated that the majority of white millennials voted for Donald Trump.

According to CNN, Trump won the youngest white demographic, ages 18 to 29, but it was by a plurality, 47%, not a majority. We regret that mistake. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. Uber's got goals. One of them is to improve the experience for both riders and drivers. They've been listening to feedback and working on ways to keep you better protected and connected during your ride so they can get better with every trip. You can read all about it at uber.com slash moving forward.