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Episode: It's the Corruption, Stupid

Author: New York Times Opinion
Duration: 01:12:18

Episode Shownotes

Right after the election, I talked about how the results reminded me of 2004. George W. Bush won re-election that year — and unlike four years earlier, the popular vote, too. Democrats were truly, undeniably in the wilderness. But two years later, they found their way out. Democrats won the

House for the first time in 12 years. And two years after that, with the election of Barack Obama, they completed their trifecta. Does that comeback story have any lessons for Democrats today?Rahm Emanuel is the person to ask. He helped orchestrate that 2006 Democratic victory as the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He was Obama’s first chief of staff. And before that, Emanuel was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton. Emanuel has been a central player in most of the biggest Democratic victories of the past few decades. And people like David Axelrod and Steve Israel have been floating his name to lead the Democratic National Committee to help guide Democrats out of the wilderness once more. But Emanuel is also a controversial figure in the party. And the eras of Democratic politics he represents have complicated legacies and aren’t remembered with unanimous warmth.In this conversation, Emanuel argues that Democrats have fallen out of touch with what Americans actually want. We discuss why Democrats lost this November, what lessons they’ve forgotten from the Obama and Clinton years and how he would plot a Democratic comeback today.Book Recommendations:Lincoln at Gettysburg by Garry WillsThe Lost by Daniel MendelsohnThe Noise of Time by Julian BarnesThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Switch and Board Podcast Studio. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Summary

In this episode of 'The Ezra Klein Show,' Rahm Emanuel discusses the Democratic Party's recent electoral losses, attributing them to a disconnect from the electorate and the rise of anti-establishment sentiment. He emphasizes the importance of accountability following major political events like the Iraq War and the financial crisis. Emanuel critiques the Democratic strategies post-Obama and underscores the need to reconnect with working-class concerns, particularly around healthcare, education, and economic security. The conversation also highlights the necessity for political reform to regain public trust and address current political challenges.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (It's the Corruption, Stupid) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:05 Speaker_05
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. So our last episode was with Faz Shakir, Bernie Sanders' former campaign manager. And it was about the question of whether Bernieism was a way forward for the Democratic Party.

00:00:42 Speaker_05
But I said at the beginning I was going to make that a pairing, that we were going to have two very different perspectives on what Democrats should do next. So here is the other. And it is, as I promised, very different.

00:00:54 Speaker_05
Rahm Emanuel is America's ambassador to Japan. Before that, he was mayor of Chicago. But it's what he did before that that interests me. Emmanuel is Barack Obama's chief of staff in the first two years of Obama's first term.

00:01:08 Speaker_05
This was when Obama passed the Stimulus Bill, the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank financial reforms.

00:01:15 Speaker_06
It's fair to say that we could not have accomplished what we've accomplished without Rahm's leadership.

00:01:21 Speaker_02
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that, it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.

00:01:29 Speaker_05
And before that, Emanuel led the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006. This was the midterm election following George W. Bush's reelection in 2004.

00:01:40 Speaker_05
And Emanuel masterminded the campaign that won the House back for Democrats for the first time in 12 years.

00:01:48 Speaker_01
Americans voted for a change in the last election, and today we got it. The new 110th Congress convened with the Democrats in charge of both houses for the first time in 12 years. And for the first time ever, a woman is Speaker of the House.

00:02:02 Speaker_09
From every corner of the country, the American people have sent a resounding and unmistakable message of change and new direction for America.

00:02:21 Speaker_05
And before that, Emanuel is one of Bill Clinton's top advisors and top fundraisers.

00:02:26 Speaker_03
There's an old saying that if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. The American people were hungry for leadership, and I'm proud that in providing that leadership, President Clinton broke a few eggs.

00:02:37 Speaker_05
Here's what you cannot take away from him. He has been at the center of most of the biggest Democratic victories, both electoral and legislative, since the 90s.

00:02:48 Speaker_05
The people who love him in the party, and there are many, they say, what this guy knows is how to win. And having lost in 2024, Democrats want to win. And so Emanuel's name is popping up a lot.

00:03:01 Speaker_05
David Axelrod, Obama's former chief strategist, said that Emanuel should be the next DNC chair. Steve Israel, a former top House Democrat, he said the same. Emanuel and his allies are clearly pushing him back into the frame.

00:03:14 Speaker_05
There's a campaign going on right now. But there is a lot of detractors too. Emanuel is a very controversial figure in the party.

00:03:23 Speaker_05
There are large factions that see the Clinton and Obama eras as good for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, but not that good for Democrats down ballot.

00:03:33 Speaker_05
And Emmanuel is not from the wing of the party that believes the American public is waiting for democratic socialism.

00:03:39 Speaker_05
He's from the wing of the party that believes Democrats are often out of touch, that they listen to what gets said in the faculty lounge and dismiss what gets said on the street corner, that the most important thing Democrats have to do in any election, particularly congressional election, is demonstrate through the candidates they run

00:03:58 Speaker_05
the things they say, and the things they choose not to say, that they're listening to the people they claim to represent.

00:04:06 Speaker_05
I've said before that I think the analog to be thinking about after 2024 is 2004, the last time a Republican president who won his first term by losing the popular vote got reelected in much more convincing fashion.

00:04:23 Speaker_05
And Rahm Emanuel was the guy, after that 2004 drubbing, who led the Democratic comeback in 2006. So I wanted to have him on the show. What did he learn in that campaign? And what does he think Democrats should do now?

00:04:36 Speaker_05
As always, my email is raclineshow at nytimes.com. Rahm Emanuel, welcome to the show. Thank you. So let's just start here. Why do you think the Democrats lost in 2024?

00:05:01 Speaker_11
I mean, look, at a certain level, when 70 percent of the country thinks the economy is bad, by equal measure, 70 percent think the country's headed in the wrong direction. That is a structural equation for an anti-incumbent election.

00:05:20 Speaker_11
Then there's, I think, a second part which takes understanding, and that is the top of the ticket performs worse than the congressional wing, which is not the norm.

00:05:34 Speaker_11
And then there's kind of this moment in time, and you can look at other places where, you know, you and I are sitting here when a right-winger just went to the top in the Romanian election. People call it populism.

00:05:45 Speaker_11
I actually call it an anti-establishment. And then I dial my clock all the way back, Ezra. Look, I think there's two seminal moments that explain the last 20 plus years in American politics.

00:05:59 Speaker_11
won the Iraq war where the American people were deceived into a war of choice. We lost thousands of young men and women. Thousands of young men and women are maimed for life.

00:06:12 Speaker_11
And we spent a trillion dollars in a failed endeavor and a war of choice and were lied to. And nobody, and I mean nobody, ever held accountable.

00:06:22 Speaker_11
Six years later, the financial industry, housing crash, near depression, people lose not their lives like in the Iraq war, but they lose their livelihood, their homes.

00:06:32 Speaker_11
So you have people losing lives, livelihood, and the elite and the top of the society totally unaccountable and never act like they did anything wrong.

00:06:41 Speaker_11
People out of the foreign policy establishment, they're on boards, institutions, universities, bankers yelling for their bonuses. and the American people are fed up. And then you fast forward through COVID.

00:06:56 Speaker_11
And I think that what happens is the Democrats go in the prior years, President Obama, the 06 election, et cetera, from anti-establishment to the establishment and the elite with the whole, the way we dealt with COVID, the way we dealt with science and talked to people.

00:07:11 Speaker_11
And I think that is a deeper current. It's unique to the United States, the first two examples, not totally the financial. And to me, that explains a lot of what I call the anti-Brussels, anti-Washington DC.

00:07:26 Speaker_05
You say no one was ever held accountable, but let's pass a voice. You all never held anyone accountable. The administration that comes after the Iraq war and the financial crisis is the Obama administration. You're the first chief of staff.

00:07:39 Speaker_05
Who was going to do it if not you?

00:07:40 Speaker_11
That's what I was going to tell you. There's a famous, in about March,

00:07:45 Speaker_11
After the stimulus, a very fair question, because we were having this debate after we passed children's health insurance, Lilly Ledbetter legislation and the stimulus bill, and a number of other things on national service and protecting kids on tobacco.

00:08:00 Speaker_11
We have this big Saturday debate. President Obama had three major initiatives, cap and trade, health care reform, and financial reform. And this is generic at 10,000 feet. Everybody, there's nuances. We have a massive debate.

00:08:18 Speaker_11
The domestic side of it said that you gotta get started on healthcare right now. It has to be first because every day you lose on healthcare. To do it, you're not gonna get there. Not wrong about the legislative politics.

00:08:31 Speaker_11
The economic team worried that if you push financial reform first, the banks won't lend and it will hold the economy back. I was arguing for Old Testament justice.

00:08:42 Speaker_11
It's been written about, about just taking a banker in the middle of the public square and literally beating the hell out of him through financial reform.

00:08:52 Speaker_11
Because the system, the society, needed not only the catharsis, but we needed not only legislative reforms, but I think the whole system needed somebody to be held accountable.

00:09:03 Speaker_11
And my argument about financial reform was the bankers would be on the other side fighting you, the financial industry.

00:09:09 Speaker_11
in healthcare to get it done, and there's a memo to this effect, is you're going to need the healthcare industry, the lessons out of the Clinton administration, on your side of the table. The interest groups had to be brought over or neutralized.

00:09:23 Speaker_11
And that was a big debate. President Obama, you weigh kind of using the clock for health care or the fear about the economy and you have to weigh these equities and never a hundred percent and you're right.

00:09:36 Speaker_11
And not a banker and not a foreign policy establishment person and that kind of populism we talk about I refer to it as anti-establishment and anti-elite.

00:09:47 Speaker_11
And then the Democrats in 06-08 win, and because not only the type of candidates, the quality of candidates, but also because we were against what the establishment had done. I think we don't realize how COVID

00:10:01 Speaker_11
flip the script and we become the establishment, we become the elite, and there's a series of other things that are additive to it. And you're not wrong to raise that question.

00:10:11 Speaker_11
I think there's a political price to pay that literally, you know, when we were doing financial reform after health care, bankers are yelling about their bonuses, they deserve bonus, Washington shouldn't tell them, and we're bailing the industry out to the tune of 800 billion dollars.

00:10:26 Speaker_11
And in those days, that was a big number. So you're not wrong on that level.

00:10:31 Speaker_05
Can you really channel anti-elite or anti-establishment sentiment through the people of the establishment? And look, I'm talking to you. You're a former White House chief of staff. You're the ambassador to Japan. You've worked in finance.

00:10:48 Speaker_05
You've worked for presidents. You have led the DCCC. There can be a tendency to say that there's an anti-establishment mood, and Democrats need to pick that up. But does that mean a personnel changeover? Right.

00:11:03 Speaker_05
Like your brother is a major health advisor and was a significant voice EECO manual during the pandemic. Your other brother runs WME. Right. Like when we talk about an anti-establishment mood, is it something that then requires

00:11:17 Speaker_05
a new generation of figures to channel that?

00:11:21 Speaker_11
Well, that's kind of a self-interested question from here. So yes and no.

00:11:25 Speaker_11
In the short answer, I mean, you look at Donald Trump and he's captured, I would not call the president-elect by any imaginations of what has to be an authentic voice of populism, yet he has sold himself as that person. And he does it

00:11:40 Speaker_11
not just on economic basis, I will be your instrument of your revenge. And he's not, it just has to be authentic. He's not exactly character A that you would point to.

00:11:51 Speaker_11
And I can give you the characters, or individuals rather, not characters, in Europe, et cetera, that also don't quote unquote fit that mold that you're talking about, and yet still have a voice that people attach to.

00:12:04 Speaker_11
That may tell you the depth of their anger, that they'll look past a lot of contradictions to get there. Fair question, but then I go back to when I was DCCC chair, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair in 2006.

00:12:18 Speaker_11
I can't tell you how many times I got told by members of the caucus, the people you're recruiting at that time, these were veterans of the Iraq-Afghanistan war, members of the intelligence community, national security apparatus, sheriffs, football players, different people, small business owners.

00:12:34 Speaker_11
And they said, well, these aren't real Democrats. I said, well, They actually reflect, as every election does, but the election has a story, a narrative behind it. They reflect this moment in time, and they are real Democrats.

00:12:47 Speaker_11
They may not have come out of your mold, but they reflect the reality of their congressional district, which I think tells that story. So part of the biography has to be authentic, but it's not 100% an explanation for electoral or policy success.

00:13:06 Speaker_11
It's a core piece, no doubt.

00:13:09 Speaker_05
And I think the feeling has to be authentic. And we're talking for two reasons, but one reason is one night, a few weeks ago, I'm sitting in my chair reading, and I get a call from a number I don't recognize, and I pick it up and it's you.

00:13:24 Speaker_05
And with a lot of fury, you start telling me, that you just feel Democrats have lost away.

00:13:31 Speaker_05
But one thing you said that you can say what you want to say from the conversation, but one thing you said that has been on my mind is that there were lessons in the Bill Clinton era, lessons in the Barack Obama era that you feel the Democratic Party has tossed aside.

00:13:46 Speaker_05
That there's, on the one hand, I think you're right, an anti-establishment mood that the Democrats and the Biden and the Harris era did not channel and could not even speak to.

00:13:56 Speaker_05
But on the other hand, one of the things you have been saying publicly and I think privately is that there has also been a throwing overboard of what you see as both institutional and political wisdom.

00:14:11 Speaker_05
that I think you understand yourself as a vessel for helping the Democratic Party, but back in front. So tell me what that wisdom is.

00:14:18 Speaker_11
Well, let me get one thing off. This is like therapy, so let me get one thing off.

00:14:21 Speaker_05
That's podcasts.

00:14:24 Speaker_11
Do you take Blue Cross Blue Shield off?

00:14:26 Speaker_05
No therapist does. That's the problem.

00:14:29 Speaker_11
Democrats, I mean, think about it. The harshest criticism of President Clinton and President Obama's tenure come from Democrats. Fact, Bill Clinton, first Democrat to get reelected since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That's a fact.

00:14:43 Speaker_11
Second, from 1968 to 1988, 20-year run, outside of Jimmy Carter, the Republicans run the presidency and they run on law and order under Richard Nixon, welfare queens under Ronald Reagan, and Willie Horton under George Herbert Walker Bush.

00:14:59 Speaker_11
Bill Clinton, from Arkansas, comes along and solves the riddle of these holes, what we would call cultures, but crime, drugs, immigration, and welfare.

00:15:11 Speaker_11
Now we can go through the policies, argue certain things, but he not only gets reelected, which is one measure of success, but he also sets in a period of time, I think it's six out of the last seven presidential elections, Democrats win the majority of votes.

00:15:26 Speaker_11
I'm not saying he's totally responsible for it, but it sets a pattern. And rather than learn the lesson, of how we solved a 20-year problem for the party that had weighed on Michael Takakis, weighed on every other candidate prior to that.

00:15:42 Speaker_11
We totally shunned his presidency aside. The people that study it are the Republicans. They learn from it.

00:15:50 Speaker_11
Now, the same thing, President Obama, through both talking about his community service in working with steel workers and communities, how he then addressed the saving, both Chrysler and GM and the auto industry, and not just the industry and the jobs, but the communities that relied on that single plant in, you know, a Youngstown, Ohio, or in a Rockford, Illinois, or in a Saginaw or Flint, Michigan.

00:16:18 Speaker_11
And he could relate. And we say, oh, well, that economic recovery was just so low and small, it wasn't big, it wasn't bold. Won Ohio, got reelected, passed major healthcare. You don't do 100%.

00:16:36 Speaker_11
And we look at this and then you can take this election and we're not only losing working class whites, we're losing working class blacks and Hispanics.

00:16:47 Speaker_11
And it is under a tenure of a president who clearly most pro-labor president since either John Kennedy or Harry S. Truman. And I've said this to you privately, I've said it publicly, there is more to people

00:17:03 Speaker_11
than the collection of their wallet and their checkbook. They care about where their kids go to school. They care about whether their wives, spouses, or partners, or children can drive a car without being carjacked.

00:17:18 Speaker_11
And yelling at people, well, crime is coming down, doesn't work. Let me tell you something. I mean, as a former mayor, nobody walks around going, you know what? I feel 22% safer in 2024 than I did in 2023. Crime's a feeling, a sense of a place of mind.

00:17:35 Speaker_11
And rather than telling people you don't see the data, which is how we come off, we should be saying, here's our agenda to ensure that we keep reducing crime, and here's what we're gonna do next.

00:17:45 Speaker_11
We're gonna work on carjacking, car thefts, which is actually, what is going up, not coming down? Now think about this. Pre-COVID is another example of an issue and where I think our party goes wrong.

00:18:00 Speaker_11
Pre-COVID, Democrats historically run somewhere between a 15 to 22 point advantage on education. From COVID forward, the only two things you hear from Democrats on education is we're going to shut the school down.

00:18:17 Speaker_11
We're going to close the front door of the school. And after COVID, we're going to blow open the bathroom school door. That's it. Not what you're gonna do on math, not what you're gonna do on reading, what you're gonna do to drive graduation.

00:18:29 Speaker_11
And now what is the net result? Not only are parents pulling kids out of public schools, we're barely breaking even on the issue of education.

00:18:38 Speaker_11
And a president is running for election saying, I'm gonna shut down the Department of Education, and we don't have a credible voice or a credible box to stand on.

00:18:45 Speaker_11
We took a singular issue that we were the voice on, and Republicans were 20 points behind us on, on average, And we've lost it all. And we don't even look at why is it. We were very strong pro-labor as a party. Joe Biden gets credit for that.

00:19:04 Speaker_11
We lost working class votes.

00:19:06 Speaker_10
And these are parents. They live in a community. They send their kids to school. They send their kids to a park facility, a library.

00:19:18 Speaker_11
They're driving in their community. We don't actually, in the name of fighting for working, we don't actually hear them. We don't listen to them. We tell them how to eat their peas.

00:19:28 Speaker_05
It's hard for me to hear you say that. And I think these are also lessons from your mayorship, which is not really where I want to focus on in this conversation.

00:19:36 Speaker_05
But a lot of the angriest criticism of you was around shutting down schools and what those schools meant to communities. Did that change your sense of what it means when a school is not functioning, what a school means in a place?

00:19:49 Speaker_11
No, I mean, there's no look. It was an angry part. I mean, I talk about it and we did things. like drive our graduation rate up. But that was the hardest, one of the hardest decisions I made as a mayor.

00:20:03 Speaker_11
You had schools that were built for 800 with 200 or less kids. And it was incredibly hard because it was not just a school, it was an anchor in the community.

00:20:14 Speaker_11
Not only couldn't you afford it, but the kids, the schools were three, four, five, six, seven years in a row failing. And the school meant something emotionally, physically, and I get it. Very tough. But I, you know, I think what's tougher?

00:20:28 Speaker_11
Letting a kid, because it was politically hard, stay in a failing school. In the end of the day, eight years later, while other mayors have opposed what I did, they haven't opened up the schools.

00:20:41 Speaker_05
One of the measures of success you mentioned with both Clinton and Obama, and I think correctly, is re-election.

00:20:45 Speaker_11
Let me say one thing. I don't mean to interrupt you, sir. I made that decision in my first term and got re-elected. I'm not saying it was easy, but there is a measure there both on the academic side and the political side.

00:20:58 Speaker_05
Well, that actually sets up what I'm going to ask, which is one of the measures you've mentioned here is re-election, right, for Clinton, for Obama. And one critique you hear of both of them is that, yes, they got re-elected.

00:21:10 Speaker_05
But under them, the Democratic Party down ballot got annihilated. So Clinton – under Clinton, Democrats lose the House for the first time in 40 years. Under Barack Obama, huge wipeouts in 2010, very, very rough election in 2014.

00:21:27 Speaker_05
And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has made a version of this argument against you that, yes, what they were able to do was successfully manage their own political capital, but they were not able to build a strong and healthy Democratic Party.

00:21:40 Speaker_05
And one of the reasons the Democratic Party subsequently turned on their brands of politics, more so on Clinton than Obama in my view, obviously Joe Biden was Obama's vice president, is that the party felt that what they did worked for them, but not for the future of the Democratic Party.

00:21:56 Speaker_11
There's a legitimacy to her observation and a conclusion. I don't think it explains everything and I don't think it's 100% accurate, but it's a valid critique.

00:22:10 Speaker_11
One, you already start under Ronald Reagan seeing what are called Reagan Democrats, that movement. And the South, which had been a bastard for Democrats that we remembered, was shifting earlier than President Clinton.

00:22:25 Speaker_11
But it was a wipeout, and it doesn't explain everything. I had disagreements with Bill Clinton. He thinks it was the assault weapon ban. I don't think it was passing the assault weapon ban that caused the loss.

00:22:37 Speaker_11
President Clinton and I, having been responsible for seeing that legislation through, had a 20-year-run debate on whether the assault weapon ban was responsible for 94. And he does get reelected and Democrats do make gains.

00:22:53 Speaker_11
And by the way, in 1998, he breaks a 100-year kind of norm, which is in the six-year presidency, a presidency just gets blown out. Actually, the Democrats pick up House seats. So her critique is not wrong, but it's not 100% accurate to what happened.

00:23:13 Speaker_11
It's more kind of devastating what happens under, from Democrats and when President Obama is done. I think we had the lowest House and legislative seats in over a hundred, in about a hundred years.

00:23:26 Speaker_11
I do think we, American politics is fundamentally different, this is my view, other people can argue, after the war and the financial meltdown.

00:23:35 Speaker_11
And it's never getting above, you can't get a president today above 60%, you can't get, you know, right track, wrong track has been politicized, economic sense, right track, wrong track in the sense of the direction of the country, economic sentiment about whether the economy's healthy or not healthy has been politicized.

00:23:54 Speaker_11
And the legitimacy and delegitimacy of Washington is in a place that's different than it was pre-2000. Now to the effect on the party, a lot of efforts under President Obama are to build outside the party, not inside the party infrastructure.

00:24:15 Speaker_11
And that has its own consequences as well. And so it's a critique.

00:24:21 Speaker_11
And as I've already said, it's somewhat accurate, but somewhat inaccurate, because I do think as you start from Bill Clinton's election forward, did create on a national level a favorable environment for Democrats, because he finally took what we call this bag of issues, this cultural set of issues, and took them off the Democratic back and allowed us to get hurt on a whole host of economic issues that we hadn't been hurt on before.

00:25:20 Speaker_05
This then gets to the other reason I wanted to have you on the show, which is after 12 years, the person who wins a house back is you. You're the chair of the DCCC in the 2006 election, which is a huge, huge Democratic wave victory.

00:25:33 Speaker_05
And I've been thinking a lot about 2004, which is maybe where I want to start, because 2004 to me felt the most for Democrats like 2024 of anything, at least in my memory. George W. Bush, it was known by then that the Iraq War was sold on lies.

00:25:50 Speaker_05
It was known by then that the Iraq War was proving to be a disaster. There's a sense that who Bush was hadn't been fully understood in 2000. He was an accidental president. There were butterfly ballots in Florida. He had lost the popular vote.

00:26:04 Speaker_05
And then in 04, when it is known, when the consequences of his policies are seemingly more clear, at least to liberals, he wins in a much more decisive fashion.

00:26:15 Speaker_05
And day after, there's a huge backlash against and inside the Democratic Party that feels very similar to today. Democrats have lost touch with the heartland, is one of the arguments. They have been too liberal on gay marriage.

00:26:31 Speaker_05
There were these gay marriage ballot initiatives that were partially blamed for their loss. There's a sense that Democrats need to moderate. They need to move to the center.

00:26:37 Speaker_05
They need to regain a connection to an America that they no longer know or understand. And there's not just a confusion, but a sense of alienation. That's at least how I would describe it.

00:26:48 Speaker_05
But let me ask you how you understood the 2004 election when it happened.

00:26:55 Speaker_11
2004 felt more like a gut punch really to the solarplex because everything else you could kind of explain away. 2002, the Republicans win in the midterm, first election post 9-11. You could explain that. 2000, you could say the Supreme Court

00:27:12 Speaker_11
The national U.S. Supreme Court cheated the Florida Supreme Court from doing their responsibility and made a decision, quote-unquote, only for this one case. To me, that was illegitimate.

00:27:22 Speaker_11
But by 2004, winning an election outright, no more trying to explain away the problem. And in 2004, you can sit there and play out how John Kerry ran, the idea that you could take a guy like President Bush

00:27:40 Speaker_11
who skirted on his own responsibilities with the National Guard, and yet John Kerry serves in Vietnam, serves his country, puts on the uniform, etc. Part of his whole, not just biography, but his political legitimacy.

00:27:54 Speaker_11
And it turns out to be seen as weak on national security. And you can argue President Bush, you know, illegitimately attacked his character and his service. I think when you look back at the campaign, then Senator Kerry totally mismanaged his campaign.

00:28:12 Speaker_11
Talking about like on Iraq, I was for it before I was against it. Just major things that become character references and character points to him.

00:28:21 Speaker_11
So, the way I look at 2004 is my conversation with Nancy Pelosi when she calls to ask me literally the first week afterwards to run the DCCC for 06 election.

00:28:32 Speaker_11
And I think that 04, there was no more hiding and making excuses to ourselves what we had lost. You couldn't use the 22,000, you know, 500 ballots in Florida, not legitimate, etc.

00:28:44 Speaker_11
We had lost three elections in a row and there was a fundamental problem. both on the quality of the people we were putting forward and the message we were putting forward.

00:28:53 Speaker_05
Well, when you say we were it, right, this is one of the questions I think is interesting about 04, and maybe it's an overly optimistic one for Democrats to look at, because Republicans then, Karl Rove said quite a lot in this direction, believe they were building a realignment.

00:29:09 Speaker_05
They believe they were building a permanent majority of some kind. They thought that 2004 foretold a reshaping of American politics. And two years later, and then four years later, it doesn't look anything like that.

00:29:23 Speaker_05
And the fear that Democrats have lost touch and need to become I don't exactly want to say Republican light, but I do want to say Republican light is also not the path back to victory.

00:29:37 Speaker_11
No, that's not.

00:29:38 Speaker_05
I mean, I'm not saying you're saying that I'm saying that was a very common piece of punditry.

00:29:44 Speaker_11
I think. Let me say this. There are issues in which you want to sand down the difference so that there isn't a difference. And the reason you want to is to move them. To your favorable terrain.

00:29:56 Speaker_11
But there's a reason I went out and recruited candidates on the national security front. If you're gonna flip a Republican district, you're gonna take all these cultural issues because the biography told a story.

00:30:12 Speaker_11
They had a legitimacy based on their experience and their story, their biography, their life's work made that swing voter culturally comfortable. That created a space for then the rest of the story to get it told.

00:30:28 Speaker_11
We both had an agenda that differed with President Bush. And I would just, for the record, last time the minimum wage got raised was right after 06 election. There was a actual strategic plan, both on the policy side and on the county recruitment side.

00:30:44 Speaker_11
And it was a hand in glove. And yes, I got, I mean, you can go back. I think you and I started to get to know each other. I was getting pummeled. I wasn't recruiting real Democrats, football players, sheriffs.

00:30:56 Speaker_11
You know, people that worked in the Air Force, armed forces of this country fought overseas. There were other people, small business owners, all types of people were recruited. Why?

00:31:07 Speaker_11
Because there was a connectivity between the voters in that district that was, and you gotta go back, those districts were created to be literally a firewall against Democrats. They were gerrymandered so you couldn't pick the lock.

00:31:25 Speaker_11
We picked the lock with candidates in districts that you were not supposed to be able to do it. Now it is the sixth year of a presently very unpopular war. And we prosecuted the war. And the war was built on building blocks of deception.

00:31:43 Speaker_11
And it was a repudiation in the sixth year of President Bush's presidency. And then we shouldn't over-forget this, in 2004, they did think, Karl Rove and others, that they were building a lasting coalition realigning politics.

00:31:56 Speaker_11
And they overshot the runway on Social Security. He never mentions it. And then comes the first thing he's going to do is, I have a mandate for Social Security. Well, bring it on. Let's go.

00:32:06 Speaker_11
because it drew the contrast where you wanted the terrain to be on your side, and we minimized the terrain on their side. That's how you develop a strategy.

00:32:17 Speaker_11
And not only did we win 30 seats in 06, we went back and won more seats in 08 in the presidential year, and followed a similar playbook. And in 2018, it was replicated again in the first midterm of President Trump's first term.

00:32:34 Speaker_11
That candidate recruitment, the issues you focus on, where you move to shift the campaign storyline to the most favorable terrain. It's not different than what president by Clinton did by addressing the set of cultural issues.

00:32:52 Speaker_11
It's not different than what President Obama did in prosecuting both against Romney and then against John McCain in the earlier 08. There are certain issues you differentiate and you have clear contrast and there are certain issues in which you don't.

00:33:08 Speaker_11
That's how you run a campaign.

00:33:10 Speaker_05
If you if you if you were thinking about that for right now. Right. And we haven't seen the Trump administration, the second Trump administration begin. We haven't seen it take shape. We don't know if there will be an analog to.

00:33:22 Speaker_05
OK, I got this question because I've been thinking. Yes. But yes.

00:33:25 Speaker_11
What what as you sit up at night or as Henry Kissinger used to say, does anybody have questions for my answers? Yes, I have. Here's what frustrates me.

00:33:37 Speaker_11
Look, Donald Trump, I do agree that President Trump, I keep doing that, he's President-elect Trump, is a threat to democracy.

00:33:48 Speaker_10
We have those voters on hello. If they think that the issue of threat to democracy, threat to the rule of law, if they're not a yes by now, they're never gonna be a yes.

00:34:00 Speaker_11
We had them on hello. President Trump is gonna turn the Oval Office into eBay. He is going to sell it to every special interest and you're going to be left paying that tab.

00:34:13 Speaker_11
And the Democratic Party is the thin blue line between the pharmaceutical industry getting everything they want or you paying everything you have. The Democratic Party is a thin blue line that will protect your kids from TikTok.

00:34:26 Speaker_11
And the Oval Office will become eBay. And whoever pays the highest price will get what they want, and you'll be left paying through the nose. We should have turned what people think. This is what polling and focus groups are about.

00:34:43 Speaker_11
They do have a view of President Trump, both his character and his strengths, his weaknesses. We never prosecuted the case of how his, not just character, but how he's going to run the Oval Office. And he did it.

00:34:58 Speaker_11
He used to say, oh, they give me lots of money. I'm going to give them, you know, like the oil and gas industry. They give me a, you know, a billion dollars. I'm going to give them all the cuts and regulations.

00:35:09 Speaker_05
Here's a very funny line on this with Elon Musk. He said, I don't like electric vehicles, but now Elon Musk supports me, so I gotta. Yeah, he was against TikTok before he was for it.

00:35:17 Speaker_11
And your kids are gonna be controlled by the Chinese. We never prosecuted what the Oval Office is gonna look like under Donald Trump and how much you're gonna pay for it. We prosecute, like, give you an example.

00:35:28 Speaker_11
Take what I think President Biden did successfully, which is get the ability to negotiate pharmaceutical prices down and negotiate with the pharmaceutical industry, and you got lower prices on insulin. We wanted to talk about the benefit we did. No.

00:35:41 Speaker_11
The first president took the pharmaceutical industry and beat the living crap out of them. And if we're not there, the thin blue line, you're going to go back to paying right through the nose.

00:35:51 Speaker_11
And President Trump, as you just by example, oil and gas industry, EVs with Elon Musk, TikTok. It was a target rich environment and we left it. We ran around around democracy and the rule of law, which I agree with. But guess what? We had those voters.

00:36:10 Speaker_11
It was the other ones we needed. We talked about what made us feel so good about ourselves. Like we're all, this is the other thing. I mean, now I'm, I really do hope you take Blue Cross Blue Shield because I got to get this.

00:36:22 Speaker_11
It's like, think about this as a party, not just that we didn't prosecute the case that was fully present and actually fits with what people are worried about, about Donald Trump. We talked about what we cared about, not what they wanted to hear.

00:36:39 Speaker_11
But also think about how we talk about any issue. As a party, this is what drives me crazy. Take this, the caring economy. I have never met anybody who's described themselves in the caring economy. I've met social workers. I met daycare workers.

00:36:56 Speaker_11
I met nurses, RNs. I've never met anybody who says I'm in the caring economy, but we talked about it. You know, when you attack people, and I say this, my uncle was a police officer, etc. Defund the police. And they said, well, it doesn't mean that.

00:37:09 Speaker_11
Well, then don't use the English language. If it doesn't mean what you said it was, don't use the English language. OK, start speaking in Japanese, French, but don't say what you just said and then tell me it doesn't mean that.

00:37:22 Speaker_11
Latinx and people that it's supposed to be appealed to, it doesn't represent them. We talk about people of color. Anybody who's been a mayor in a city knows that doesn't exist. We use language to feel good about ourselves, not to communicate.

00:37:38 Speaker_11
We all think we're applying to be adjunct professors at a small liberal arts college. We come off exactly like who we are. It's insane.

00:37:47 Speaker_10
And the case against Donald Trump, now again, I wanna be honest, I've been in Tokyo for three years. It pretty clear, It wasn't democracy and the rule of law.

00:37:59 Speaker_11
After the last eight years he's been in the public life, that was apparent. And everything that was, all the gold that you could have gotten out of that, you had. It was the other piece of the story that actually mattered to people's pocketbooks.

00:38:13 Speaker_11
And he will, and you can see by the cabinet that President-elect Trump is putting together, he will turn the Oval Office, not only to the special interests who,

00:38:25 Speaker_11
President Biden fought, whether it was on oil and gas, whether it was pharmaceutical prices, took on every one of those special interests who had had control of Washington. He broke their hold. And Donald Trump is going to let him back in.

00:38:38 Speaker_11
And not only back in, you're going to pay for it every day. And we never prosecuted the other piece of it. The American dream is unaffordable. The American dream is inaccessible and it's unacceptable to us.

00:38:54 Speaker_11
The idea that people can walk around with multiple homes and a family can't get a home, can't afford a retirement, can't afford their kid's education is unacceptable.

00:39:08 Speaker_05
There's a whole case to be made. Isn't that a hard case to make when it's worst in the places where Democrats govern? No.

00:39:16 Speaker_11
Not at all, because you're thinking about it, because I don't want to criticize you on your show. I'm a fair target on my show, man. No, because you're thinking linear. This is about where your heart is. This is about where your sentiment is.

00:39:34 Speaker_11
I mean, I want to go back to Bill Clinton, but as he said in the snows in New Hampshire, when his draft letter is out, the hits on me are nothing compared to the hits that your kids are going to take if we don't turn this country around.

00:39:49 Speaker_11
Now, I didn't say to you one policy right there. It's a sentiment about where your heart and soul is.

00:39:56 Speaker_00
Somebody's got to stand up and fight for real change. Look, this is a contact sport. I knew all this would happen, or I knew something like this would happen. This is not about me. I can handle this. What's the worst that can happen to me?

00:40:07 Speaker_00
I go home to my family, my friends, my life, my job. This is not a big deal. For me, it is a very big deal for the political process, and that's where I want to leave it.

00:40:18 Speaker_00
You know, I want to see this election fought out on what we're going to do to change the future of the people of this country. And most of the people do, too, and they are being robbed of the chance to do it. That's the point I want to make.

00:40:30 Speaker_11
I mean, I have my own criticism of what are tough things and how Democrats make things more difficult than they need to be to get things done.

00:40:38 Speaker_11
As a former mayor trying to get a train station opened up and how many multiple environmental studies you have to do at the city level, the state level, the federal level. There is a need for reform.

00:40:50 Speaker_11
And we gotta be honest about it, but the fact that it's more what I'm talking about, whether it's owning a home, saving for your kids' education, saving for your retirement, being able to afford a healthcare expense without going into chapter 11.

00:41:01 Speaker_11
That is not only a sentiment, but also where your heart and soul is. People are, yes, you are right, linear, Ezra. What are the policies to do that? But they really just wanna know, do you get it? Do you know where they are?

00:41:16 Speaker_11
I used to, I mean, there was a whole thing we started about what I called Congress on your corner. And I used to meet people at grocery stores, not town halls, but just where they live their lives, where they're shopping.

00:41:32 Speaker_11
And if they wanted to come over and talk about Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits, immigration issues, schools, some of my best policies that I introduced came from those times where I met people at a grocery store. Congress on your corner.

00:41:46 Speaker_11
So when you say, oh, well, that's the worst in cities, eh, I don't agree with that. It just kind of broad brush. That said, there's enough problems that we could be the party that reforms government, makes it more responsive to people.

00:42:28 Speaker_05
I want to pick up on that idea of reform and corruption. I was thinking this week and talking to people in politics who actually run in and win elections.

00:42:37 Speaker_05
And this kept coming up, that in 1994, one of the absolute best issues for Republicans in retaking Congress for the first time in 40 years was reform. They ran on term limits, on balanced budget, right?

00:42:53 Speaker_05
They ran against Democrats as corrupt and out of touch. People really, I think, forget how much Barack Obama's 2008 campaign was a reformist campaign.

00:43:03 Speaker_07
I'll make our government open and transparent, so that anyone can ensure that our business is the people's business. As Justice Louise Brandeis once said, sunlight is the greatest disinfectant.

00:43:16 Speaker_07
And as president, I'm going to make it impossible for congressmen or lobbyists to slip pork barrel projects or corporate welfare into laws when no one's looking, because when I'm president, meetings where laws are written will be more open to the public, no more secrecy.

00:43:32 Speaker_07
That's a commitment I make to you as president.

00:43:39 Speaker_05
He ran against special interests, against cable news, against political consultants. He was somebody who ran as disgusted with the way Washington worked. In 2016, Donald Trump ran as a political reformer, a wrecking ball to drain the swamp.

00:43:54 Speaker_11
2006, we ran against the house that Tom DeLay built.

00:43:57 Speaker_04
Because this all comes back to the American people. They have to have confidence. that Congress is here to work in the people's interest, not the special interest.

00:44:06 Speaker_04
They have to know, and I honestly believe, that you cannot advance the people's agenda unless you drain the swamp that is Washington, D.C.

00:44:15 Speaker_05
And then in this election, one of the things that happened was Democrats became very much synonymous with the institutions. Joe Biden is both the president and has been in Washington for many decades.

00:44:27 Speaker_05
Kamala Harris is the vice president of that administration. And one thing that just did not exist in the Democratic campaign was any kind of reformist impulse. There was Donald Trump who hates the way Washington works. A hundred percent.

00:44:43 Speaker_05
And the Democrats who were there to defend Washington from Donald Trump.

00:44:48 Speaker_11
Look, reform and as well as corruption aren't the same thing. And yes, they also are heads and tails of the same coin. This is also why in Europe, you're getting people running races against Brussels.

00:44:59 Speaker_11
We don't fully, as I can say as a former mayor of a big city, government is way too big and cumbersome. And it is too hard to do basic things. And we end up defending the rules rather than the results. We need to be the party that is for the results.

00:45:23 Speaker_11
And if the government is a problem, or the rules and regulations that we have the right purpose, but are becoming their own problem, we're defending something that is indefensible. Look, a classic example.

00:45:37 Speaker_11
If climate change, which I agree, is an existential crisis, you don't leave it just to FERC. It's either an existential crisis or FERC is the greatest thing that ever existed.

00:45:46 Speaker_05
FERC being the group that does transmission, line regulations and permitting. Thank you for explaining what I said. Democrats seem a lot of touch to me, Rahm.

00:45:56 Speaker_11
Too many acronyms. I have a rule here as ambassador. One acronym per paragraph. OK, that's it. No more. Look, I agree climate change is an existential crisis. But you can't tell me it's an existential crisis.

00:46:10 Speaker_11
And the way FERC operates to agree to get a transmission line in, which has a seven-year backlog, is perfect. Never to be touched. We're going to defend FERC. I understand the role it plays.

00:46:21 Speaker_11
Are you telling me there's nothing we can do that guarantees an end result in two years so we can actually do what we said we were going to do, get transmission lines that can handle solar, wind, and other renewables? It's crazy.

00:46:36 Speaker_11
And on the face of it, it's crazy. It's an existential crisis that will wait seven years for a result to build a transmission line from one city to another.

00:46:45 Speaker_11
My grandfather said, the great political philosopher, Hermann Schmolowitz, what are you, Mishuganah? This is crazy. I did an L-stop near McCormick Place, a train stop in Chicago. We had to do an environmental study.

00:46:57 Speaker_11
After we were done, the state did an environmental study, another 18 months. After both of us were done, we sent it up to Washington. They did another environmental study. And you're telling me there's nothing we can do?

00:47:09 Speaker_11
It took three years to put a train station on an empty lot.

00:47:13 Speaker_05
It's crazy. One reason this is a hard case for Democrats to make is there's nothing they did. And specifically here, this has been a frustration for me because I focus much too much probably on environmental permitting and inciting.

00:47:26 Speaker_05
Look, the Biden administration, the administration you're part of as ambassador, their signal accomplishment is the Inflation Reduction Act, which is primarily built around decarbonization investments. And alongside that, the infrastructure bill.

00:47:38 Speaker_11
And health care.

00:47:39 Speaker_05
I think that's an important thing that was in there, but I'm going to say the climate investments were the big piece of that. I got it.

00:47:44 Speaker_05
And they did not ever put forward, even though they know and they have said publicly that a huge problem is getting this stuff built quickly, they did not ever put forward their own significant permitting reform plan, bill, anything.

00:47:59 Speaker_05
They supported the Joe Manchin plan that eventually emerged, which was a mixed bag, to say the least.

00:48:06 Speaker_05
But because it would split their own coalition, because permitting reform is a difficult issue for Democrats because a lot of the environmental groups don't like it, they never came out and said, this is what we think we should do to truly speed this up.

00:48:18 Speaker_11
The party should have done what I don't and I'm not here to try to relive Bill Clinton. The Al Gore, it worked. The Al Gore Commission that reformed government.

00:48:27 Speaker_11
It did actually cut bureaucrats in Washington, rules and regulations, and it funded adding 100,000 community police officers throughout the country, which actually is starting in 94.

00:48:39 Speaker_11
If you take 10 years after 94 versus 10 years before 94, you can look at the difference between crime rates. It worked on reforming government. It also worked on funding public safety and other initiatives that Democrats cared about.

00:48:53 Speaker_11
We should be against government rules. Now let me side note, this is not the core of your question. People always say democracy is broken. It's not.

00:49:03 Speaker_11
It's very successful at the state and local level where people have trust in their government and feel it touches their lives and they have a connection to it.

00:49:11 Speaker_11
It's broken in Brussels and in Washington, the farther government gets away, where only rules of regulations are what we care about and processes. We never ever talk about the results. We defend a status quo that is broken.

00:49:25 Speaker_11
We're insane doing it politically, and it's not actually accurate about what it's trying to accomplish. And then there's a side piece. I laughed when I was snickering here, you can't tell.

00:49:38 Speaker_11
When President Obama becomes a senator, I'm a congressman, Illinois and Chicago, Marty Meehan, my colleague in the House, and Senator Obama, Russ Feingold, John McCain, we worked on a lobbying and ethics reform legislation, and it passed it.

00:49:57 Speaker_11
And I'm unfairly, I think it was Chris Shays was the Republican in the House who worked with us on it. It was bipartisan, et cetera, yeah.

00:50:05 Speaker_11
fighting and it was coming on the heels, we fought against all the corruption that, you know, you used to talk about public corruption, but a lot of people also saw the war and the way it was prosecuted at that time as corruption.

00:50:20 Speaker_11
It wasn't this distinct piece of government rules, regulations, money, lobbyists, access, et cetera. They also thought the way Washington worked, how we got ourselves deceptively into a war was corruption.

00:50:34 Speaker_11
And so we worked on that together and it was what President Obama ran on because we had worked on it when he was a senator and I was a congressman. It was the legislation we introduced and passed.

00:50:46 Speaker_11
And again, whether it's the integrity of public service or whether it's also the knowing that the system and the rules and regulations are not producing the results we want, we as part of the establishment have adopted the voice of defending the establishment when it's failing.

00:51:06 Speaker_11
It's like makes no sense policy-wise and it's absolutely a dead failure politically.

00:51:12 Speaker_05
Why do you think Democrats have done that?

00:51:14 Speaker_11
And you're asking me, Democrats, and it's like a lot of us, but... Why do you think that has happened? No, I know it's, you know, I think it's happened because we're comfortable in being the establishment.

00:51:27 Speaker_11
We're comfortable with what we have built and defended. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt talked about constantly reforming, constantly changing, and if it doesn't succeed, throw it out, try something else.

00:51:38 Speaker_11
I want to tell a little anecdote to illustrate a point.

00:51:42 Speaker_11
In the balanced budget negotiations in 1997, when we get to kids' health care, President Clinton had pediatric care, eye and dental care, paid through Medicaid expansion to take kids whose parents worked, made more money than Medicaid, but get them health care.

00:52:01 Speaker_11
The Republicans had only pediatric care, no eye and dental, but it had to be a new program outside of Medicaid because they hated Medicaid. Final blah, blah, blah, blah, we need Bruce Reed, Gene Sperling, myself, we negotiate.

00:52:14 Speaker_11
It would be the president's health care plan, pediatric care, eye and dental, but it would not be in Medicaid. And a number of Democrats voted against it because we weren't screaming about Medicaid.

00:52:25 Speaker_11
I said, you know, I got to say this as a son of a pediatrician, and I know a lot of people think I'm something of a son of something else, but people never talked about how they got paid. They cared about whether the kids had eye and dental care.

00:52:37 Speaker_11
That's what the priorities are. And we were a defender of how it was going to be funded rather than what the result was. The result of Kids Health Care Plan was to get kids health care.

00:52:48 Speaker_11
not to fight about which government program paid it or whether it was a new one. I get the point, it's very important if you work at the Brookings Institute in Aspen.

00:52:56 Speaker_11
It is not important if you're a working mother and you're single and you're trying to figure out how to get your children healthcare. They make sure they have sunglasses so they can read the blackboard. That's what matters.

00:53:06 Speaker_11
And we lost people because it wasn't Medicaid expansion. And again, it's legitimate. It's just not more important than the end result, which was healthcare for children.

00:53:19 Speaker_11
I think the critique is that I think this show is very good for my emotional health.

00:53:24 Speaker_05
I'm happy to hear that. We try to provide many levels of service here.

00:53:30 Speaker_11
I don't think you actually get full benefit of what you're doing.

00:53:32 Speaker_05
So, yeah, the critique I hear is that the reason Democratic Party does not want to change more or does not focus more on changing the way things work, is that many of the people in it benefit from it.

00:53:44 Speaker_05
And they benefit from it in ways that are legitimate and straightforward, right? They work for programs that they want those programs to be funded. They use powers like the ability to sue under the environmental litigation.

00:53:57 Speaker_05
They often use it for good reasons, but then they don't want it foreclosed on them, even if it's having bad effects elsewhere. And there's a view that there's corruption in the Democratic Party, too. There's views that Nancy Pelosi did not want the

00:54:10 Speaker_05
to change the rules on insider trading of individual stocks among members of Congress.

00:54:15 Speaker_05
But there is a sense that Democrats are in this system, making money, having good jobs, being inside the revolving door, and that you can't trust them to change a system they benefit from, all the way from the staffers moving from place to place, up to people like Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi, who have done pretty well in politics.

00:54:39 Speaker_11
I think the problem is you're conflating both reforming ethics and reforming the government the way it works. So I would just say to you, Ezra, that while they fit together, they're separate issues.

00:54:55 Speaker_11
The Democrats have always been the party, not always, we have ups and downs on this, but fighting corruption. I can say that in my tenure as mayor, three different ethics packages. And I can continue to do that.

00:55:09 Speaker_11
And we have to be a party that is never satisfied, never the defenders of the status quo, always wanting to change something to make other people's lives better. And that's been our voice, going back to whether it's Kennedy, Roosevelt, Truman,

00:55:25 Speaker_11
Whatever, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, pick your president. The fact is, being satisfied with the way things are is not where people are.

00:55:35 Speaker_05
But I think the argument here is that people in the Democratic Party benefit from the way things are. And they raise money from the way things are. And that's a tough thing about this system. You need money to run these elections.

00:55:47 Speaker_05
I was reading a bunch of old pieces, New Yorker profiles of you, pieces about the 06 campaign, about the just difficulty of raising money in that campaign, the decisions you all were making for this $100,000 or that $500,000.

00:56:00 Speaker_05
And the argument that has been made again and again is that it just, in order to win in the system, you almost have to become a party that is a defender of the system.

00:56:11 Speaker_05
And that that's something in the end that in his own strange way, Trump with his own money, Elon Musk with his own money, were able to exploit because people thought they were outside the system and as such not corrupted by it.

00:56:24 Speaker_11
True and not true. That's why you prosecute a case that the Oval Office is going to become eBay. and sell out, you know? That's why you prosecute that case.

00:56:35 Speaker_11
Because, you know, if you're telling me that we're the only people, individuals, that's quote unquote making money on the system, which I don't accept the critique, then you make it about the other side, which actually, if you go look at the polling in the focus groups, was more believable.

00:56:51 Speaker_05
One thing I wonder if Democrats are underestimating the danger of is the Vivek Ramaswamy-Elon Musk Department of Government efficiency. And you've got Musk, who has an incredibly loud megaphone through X, which he owns and controls.

00:57:06 Speaker_05
And, you know, it's sitting outside the government. It's not exactly sure what power it will have.

00:57:11 Speaker_05
They're putting people like Marjorie Taylor Greene in charge of important dimensions of this, which suggests to me they may not approach this in the most strategic and careful way.

00:57:23 Speaker_05
But nevertheless, you have something that can have incredible levels of media attention and publicity around it where Republicans are in a very high-profile way going at at least what they call government inefficiency.

00:57:36 Speaker_05
What have you thought watching that thing stand up? And how do you think Democrats should respond to it?

00:57:42 Speaker_11
I would say welcome it, and I would say 100% ready to meet with you, so let's go, and have a full agenda that puts them on their back foot. And they have to make a choice between what they say they're for and what their actual interests are.

00:57:57 Speaker_11
The part of a political strategy is you put people in, as Yogi Berra used to say, where you get to the fork in the road, take it. And so that's what would be my approach. Not fight it. People want to reform something, change something. I'm 100% for it.

00:58:10 Speaker_11
Let's go. Couldn't be more excited, ready to meet today. And then I would put it down on the table. And I'd have a full agenda, 10 items, that is proactive, not waiting, not in the receiving, say, don't say, show me stuff.

00:58:23 Speaker_11
Here's what we want to get done. And then go right at the soft underbelly of the other side.

00:58:30 Speaker_05
The flip side of that commission is that all of a sudden, you have Ramaswamy, who's on this show and has made the point that in his view, Medicare and Medicaid are mistakes. You have Musk, who is tweeting out Ron Paul clips.

00:58:42 Speaker_05
It reminds me a little bit of Bush and social security privatization, where you have Trump, a candidate who did not run on massive spending cuts to government, who has now appointed people who get attention on them in a way

00:58:59 Speaker_05
other people, you know, who are in his actual government will not, who seem very excited about cutting ideally trillions of dollars in government spending.

00:59:08 Speaker_05
The new person Trump is appointing, Treasury Secretary, has also talked about the need for very significant spending cuts that Trump for a long time operated

00:59:17 Speaker_05
outside of the long-running Republican desire to slash deep into government operations in ways that were often pretty unpopular. And in his first term, Republicans spent more money and didn't pay for it, and cut taxes and didn't pay for it.

00:59:32 Speaker_05
And now, all of a sudden, in his second term, it seems like there is a return, but under a more Trumpist banner, of the hack and slash side of the Republican Party. Is that an opportunity for Democrats? Yes.

00:59:48 Speaker_11
They have inherent contradiction. They have people want to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and they have a president who doesn't. That's like, go, let's go for it. Let's go have this debate. Ready.

00:59:59 Speaker_11
And if they want to go after poor kids and nutritional programs. Let's have it. They want to go after the subsidies we give single people who are small business owners getting access to health care and have premium support? Let's have that. I'm ready.

01:00:15 Speaker_11
I will tell you this one anecdote, and I'm named by President Obama Chief of Staff. So one of the things I first do when we get to Washington is I ask Senator McConnell, then the minority leader, for a meeting, and he brings his leadership.

01:00:31 Speaker_11
And Senator McConnell says, I think we should work on Social Security. And remember, this is 08. The economy is literally going headfirst into a depression. And the idea that the first thing we're going to work on is Social Security.

01:00:45 Speaker_11
So I said, well, why don't we do this? There's a lot of ideas kicking around. Why don't you propose some legislation on Social Security, what your ideas are for reform? And I will tell you, we'll be open to hearing about them. But you're a big leader.

01:00:57 Speaker_11
You have a big platform. Make your changes. We're going to work right now on getting the economy away from a depression. And he kind of had this wry smile, knowing exactly what I was saying.

01:01:06 Speaker_11
So if others in the Republican Party and President Trump's appointees want to propose cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, put it out there. Be my guest. I got some ideas of how to expand health care coverage for people.

01:01:21 Speaker_11
You have ideas about how you want to cut it? Let's have that debate.

01:01:26 Speaker_05
You've been floated by David Axelrod, among others, for Democratic National Committee chair. Is that a job you want?

01:01:32 Speaker_11
I think I want the Democrats to get back being the majority party and fighting for the families and their children.

01:01:41 Speaker_11
Whether I'm gonna finish up my job in the next month here in Tokyo, I have three things I gotta get done, feel very good about the tenure here in the alliance.

01:01:51 Speaker_11
And when I get back to America and back to my home in Chicago, I'll make my decision on what I'm gonna do the best way I think I can do that.

01:02:00 Speaker_05
Whoever is DNC chair next, what should the DNC be? Political parties are something very different than they were three generations ago, two generations ago. They go back and forth right now.

01:02:15 Speaker_05
Lara Trump is the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, so that's become a much more personalist party.

01:02:22 Speaker_05
When you look at the Democratic Party, and you've been a Democratic Party man for many, many years now and serving in many different dimensions of it, what do you think the party should do? What role should it play in people's lives?

01:02:34 Speaker_05
What is a political party? in the year 2024, and what should it be in the year 2030?

01:02:42 Speaker_11
Well, you got to deal with the here and now, and then you got to plan for the long term.

01:02:48 Speaker_11
So one is, within a year, you're going to have a very important election for governor of New Jersey and governor of Virginia, and you're going to have state house elections.

01:02:59 Speaker_11
Now, you've got to make sure you have the resources for that and the ability to support the candidates who get the nomination and to make the most of what will be one year into President Trump's tenure.

01:03:12 Speaker_11
And one of the things I think Democrats have to do, if I was at DNC and working with the party chairs, but I'm not that, is we are going to have every position, every county, somebody's going to have a name on the ballot.

01:03:25 Speaker_11
Because if it's a referendum election, you want to have people in poll position. And you gotta have the infrastructure to do that. Both the old shoe leather plus digital. Not one or the other. But then there's the ideas.

01:03:39 Speaker_11
We have spent eight years telling everybody what we're against on Donald Trump. We're very anti-the-Trump. We haven't filled out the profile what we're pro-America. Now, I'm a product, like everybody else is, of my tenure.

01:03:54 Speaker_11
You could go back to President Clinton's three covenant speeches.

01:03:57 Speaker_11
He filled out that he was not just against 12 years of Reagan and Bush, but here's what we got to do, as he would say, to build a bridge to the 21st century, so everybody can get across that bridge.

01:04:08 Speaker_11
So you have to not just build an identity opposing Trump. You have to also build an identity of who you're fighting for, why you're fighting, who you're fighting against, and what you're fighting for the end result to be.

01:04:21 Speaker_11
And a party can help build that. Now, in past times, when Bill Clinton was head of the DLC, that was the intellectual energy, the Democratic leadership circle. for that kind of intellectual work.

01:04:34 Speaker_11
So a party has to do both of those, not only win elections, not only help Ruku K, not only fund them, not only have the infrastructure, but then have the intellectual healthy debate about where we're going to go as a party and how we're going to do that.

01:04:47 Speaker_05
You talked about finding candidates in 2006 that defied the stereotypes of Democratic Party and helped pick the locks in Republican districts, candidates who had a different profile in national security or law enforcement.

01:05:02 Speaker_05
Given what this moment is, given the types of places in which Democrats are struggling, more rural districts, working class voters, who are those candidates now? If you were either overseeing or advising,

01:05:17 Speaker_05
a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair working on candidate recruitment, who are you looking for?

01:05:22 Speaker_11
You know, it's interesting if you look at some of the frontrunners in both the New Jersey governor's race and the Virginia governor's race.

01:05:30 Speaker_11
I think Gottheimer in Jersey, Sprenger in Virginia, both have been independent enough that they've taken on their own party. It's part of their character. It's part of their profile. They're not just a yes person.

01:05:45 Speaker_11
They have fought, whether it's leadership or interest groups. Oh, there's gonna be a primary, they gotta win it. But it's interesting to me that those are some of the names battling around.

01:05:55 Speaker_11
I think independence is a streak that I'm gonna look for, that if I was sitting here and I could, like, give me somebody that ran against the grain, said publicly what people are thinking, but didn't have the courage of it, and they did.

01:06:12 Speaker_11
So their independence as a quality, that gives them kind of the anti-establishment, the anti-elite tone. I'm sitting here at 10,000 feet two years, you know, we're not about three weeks away from the last election.

01:06:25 Speaker_11
To me, independence, saying things that are politically correct, willing to take on not just X interest group or whatever, but even your own party's interest group or leadership. To me, that's the gold mine I want to go work in.

01:06:45 Speaker_05
Democrats are watching with a lot of alarm at nominations like Hegseth for defense, nominations like Tulsi Gabbard for national intelligence.

01:06:57 Speaker_05
They were very obviously worried about the Matt Gaetz nomination that has been since withdrawn or replaced by Pam Bondi.

01:07:03 Speaker_05
There are things Donald Trump is doing and will do that have more of the flavor of authoritarianism, more of the flavor of installing loyalists in key roles where the government could be weaponized.

01:07:15 Speaker_05
And on the one hand, I think that is the most dangerous set of things I see him at least seeming to be interested in. And on the other hand, those may not be the things that most Americans care about or even really believe you on. Right.

01:07:31 Speaker_05
Those are not pocketbook issues. Those are not necessarily corruption that will line his pockets.

01:07:37 Speaker_05
And so there's going to be at least sometimes this choice Democrats need to make between the things that scare them most and the things that if you're watching a focus group or thinking about what will help in a forthcoming election.

01:07:54 Speaker_05
you really want to make the center of your message over and over and over and over again. How do you think about that trade-off when you are trying to oppose or block someone who doesn't have authoritarian, at least, pretenses?

01:08:07 Speaker_11
You know, President Trump and his team, it's going to be a target-rich environment of things you're going to oppose. But not everything has to be opposed.

01:08:15 Speaker_11
And you're going to have to be disciplined about you pick and choose where you're going to have the fight. If you fight everything, Part of his strategy is to so overwhelm the system, you're going to drown in it.

01:08:27 Speaker_11
When it comes to a cabinet, this may be the old chief of staff of me. If you're on the other side of this, you're going to have to pick where you're going to, you can't do the whole cabinet and you can't do all of them.

01:08:37 Speaker_11
You can't do, just you want to do national security. And so you have to, if you're Democrats organizing this, you're going to have to look at the whole field. What makes Republicans most uncomfortable?

01:08:49 Speaker_11
They're not going to break from the president on all of them. What puts them in the weakest position, not only vis-a-vis the White House, but what puts them in the weakest position vis-a-vis the American people?

01:09:00 Speaker_11
And then that person and that fight becomes character defining of the other side. And character defining for your side.

01:09:09 Speaker_11
So I look at this, and I look at Tulsi Gabbard as a place, when you look at all the information, and they'll run a process that's gonna make the Republicans in the Senate very, very uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable.

01:09:24 Speaker_11
There's a tactical win there, and it will expose certain things. And so you have to think of it both tactically and strategically, and then which fights do I want to beat the more prominent? Not just about the people, but about other things.

01:09:37 Speaker_11
I happen to think that we want to be the party that positions that Donald Trump and the Republicans are now the establishment. They're pulled into a whole set of special interests, and you are not in their line of sight except for your pocketbook.

01:09:51 Speaker_11
Look, you're going to have an attempt to politicize the Federal Reserve. You're going to have a massive discussion, a raising of tariffs, and you're going to talk about another couple trillion dollars to the national debt and deficit.

01:10:03 Speaker_11
I think at a certain point, there's a possibility that the credibility of the United States could get hit.

01:10:09 Speaker_11
Not only is inflation not going to go down, it's going to continue to go up, and I think we can make an argument that you're going to be paying the cost for these individuals and the special interests that they represent.

01:10:18 Speaker_11
You talked about autocracy and threat to democracy. We have people on that. It's what they're going to do to your wallet and your children that I want to protect.

01:10:28 Speaker_11
And there's going to be a set of events when it comes to cost and affordability that is going to be real. And you're setting it up not just for that individual fight, but from here all the way through the midterm up to 2028.

01:10:41 Speaker_11
And I could be wrong and maybe somebody else has a different view that it is about democracy. They can make that argument. I think we just have an election that proved that.

01:10:50 Speaker_11
I think this is about people's pocketbooks, and I think it's about who the Republicans are fighting for and who we're fighting for, not just the end result, but who we're going to fight for.

01:11:00 Speaker_05
And then always our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

01:11:06 Speaker_11
Gary Wills' Gettysburg, Daniel Mendelsohn's Lost, and Julian Barnes' The Noise of Time.

01:11:17 Speaker_05
Rahm Emanuel, thank you very much. This episode of The Azulklanjo is produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Isaac Jones and Amin Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon.

01:11:51 Speaker_05
The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Kristen Lynn, and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Siemielewski and Shannon Busta.

01:12:02 Speaker_05
The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Switch and Board Podcast Studio.