Oct. 16, 2015 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
58:19
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| All right, I'm very excited today. | ||
| We are at Politicon. | ||
| We have a packed room. | ||
| I don't even have to make that up. | ||
| We actually have a standing room, only room at Politicon. | ||
| I am here with Michael Steele. | ||
| He is the former head of the Republican Party. | ||
| Can I say that? | ||
| Is that the official, you were the head of the Republican National Committee, but can I say- I was chairman of the Republican National Committee, head of the party, the guy with the biggest target on his back, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| He is also the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, and are you still currently at MSNBC? | ||
| I am. | ||
| I'm an analyst over at MSNBC, so one of a very small group of conservative voices over there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Do they let you guys in over there? | ||
| Who else besides? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They do. | |
| We have to come in the back, but we get to come. | ||
| I get to come in, and folks are very nice. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| I get water, and Every once in a while I get to, you know, say hi to people, so it's good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wait, who else are the conservatives over there? | |
| Joe Scarborough and me. Yeah. | ||
| Alright, good, very good, very good. | ||
| Okay, so there's a ton I want to talk to you about, including cable news, so we'll save some of that for later. | ||
| So let's just start first, because you are a Republican. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now, according to my notes they gave me here, you are black, is that correct? | ||
| Today, yes. | ||
| Well, you know, I've been working on the tan, and I've gotten really good at it, so yeah. | ||
| Yeah, alright, so a black Republican that was once the head of the party. | ||
| I know, imagine. | ||
| They exist. | ||
| Explain that to me. | ||
| It's called history, and a lot of folks really don't appreciate the very unique history between the Republican Party and the black community. | ||
| It is our political home. | ||
| It is where we first emerged in this country politically and certainly, you know, Lincoln and the abolitionists and in fact the party was born out of a fight between abolitionists and Whigs over the issue of slavery and thankfully the abolitionists won and the Republican Party was essentially formed. | ||
| Frederick Douglass, a notable African American slave, then free man, was very much a part of helping to build this party. | ||
| So, we've got this very unique history. | ||
| And as a young kid of 17, looking at getting involved politically for the first time, I was like, you know, my mom, who is a Roosevelt Democrat, you know, my family very much Democrats, and my mother raised me to say, hey, you know, go out there and discover and decide for yourself. | ||
| Don't let our party affiliation or what we're doing influence you just because we're Democrats and your aunt's a Democrat and your grandmother's a Democrat. | ||
| And your grandfather's a Democrat and your cousins are Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no pressure at all. | |
| So I did. | ||
| I went out and I did the study and I realized that, well, this is our home. | ||
| This is the political home for the party. | ||
| Ronald Reagan was running for president in 76 at that time. | ||
| It was my first election to vote in. | ||
| And he sounded a lot like my mom in terms of how my mother talked to me about me, you know, as a young man in this country and, you know, having opportunities, taking advantages of opportunities. | ||
| So it connected. | ||
| It resonated. | ||
| And, you know, I went and told Mom, eh, you know, I registered as a Republican, and she looked at me and said, Lord, why'd you do that? | ||
| Why'd you do that? | ||
| But, you know, it's all been good. | ||
| Yeah, so that's a lot of the history, but I think I'm going to guess that a lot of the people here would say, well, this doesn't seem to be the party for black people now. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| And I hate playing identity politics. | ||
| Yeah, I don't want to get into that because that's a slippery slope on so many levels for both parties, actually, who've really screwed up our politics with identity politics, and we can have that discussion. | ||
| There is a legitimacy to the point that we have, I think, failed over the last 50 years to appreciate that history. | ||
| And I started with that history because, to me, it is an important place to start. | ||
| Because you then follow that into the fight that would later come on civil rights. | ||
| The Republican leaders, who themselves conservatives at that time, like their forefathers politically, the abolitionists, were stewards of this ideal in the Senate, in the House. | ||
| And Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, knew that. | ||
| A political decision was made for crass political gain. | ||
| And that was to, that national politics, the idea of controlling the presidency or winning elections for Congress, meant more than other things. | ||
| And we walked away. | ||
| We walked away from the black community. | ||
| And I think we are still paying the price for that. | ||
| Yeah, so I think that's a good setup for the first part here, which, what does being a Republican in 2015 in America right now with our system is so screwed up, so wacky, I feel like people don't even know what the names are anymore. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| What does it mean to you? | ||
| They've lost meaning because it's all gotten conflated into other labels. | ||
| And so, you know, whether it's Tea Party or it's conservative or it's this. | ||
| I just make the case that at the end of the day, there's a thread of values or principles, ideals that you ascribe to, whether it is your view on the role of government in the lives of the American people. | ||
| Historically, Republicans have not been anti-government. | ||
| They have been for limited government. | ||
| They think government is a legitimate entity. | ||
| It has a legitimate purpose, though a limited purpose. | ||
| Whether that thread or idea It centers around how you view the culture. | ||
| In other words, that morality and concerns for the unborn or whatever the issues may be, that's a part of that narrative. | ||
| So there are broader strokes that have been used or sort of stripped down in a way that gets us into this crass political discussion. | ||
| About, I'm right, you're wrong, on an issue. | ||
| And that's never really the goal. | ||
| And I think, I kind of sum it up this way, that I look at the party, and I certainly saw this as a county chairman, as a national chairman, and as a state chairman. | ||
| That even in a state like Maryland, I had Western Maryland, which was very conservative, I had, where I lived, in Prince George's, in the Beltway area, which was very liberal. | ||
| You had Southern Maryland, which was conservative but trending purple. | ||
| You had, you know, so you had these different dynamics, and you have to kind of lead in that. | ||
| You've got to govern in that. | ||
| And you realize that politics is really about the art of the possible. | ||
| It's not about the art of the angry or scoring points or gaining advantage. | ||
| It really is about how do I take all of these disparate parts And different viewpoints, and figure out how to affect a positive change or policy, a positive change on a set of, you know, ideas. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's gotten lost today, and it's hard, and you're seeing this play out right now in the GOP, this inter-Nicene struggle over identity, who we are, what we believe, and why we value that. | ||
| Yeah, so to the point of what the party actually stands for, I'm always amazed by the fact that if you take two hot-button issues that are clearly Democrat pocket issues, gay rights and legalizing marijuana, those are Democrat issues. | ||
| They're basically for legalizing weed, basically for gay rights. | ||
| But it seems to me a true Republican that would want small government, well, you wouldn't care what someone does in their bedroom, whether it's having sex with someone of the same sex or whether smoking weed, right? | ||
| Shouldn't that be a Republican issue? | ||
| Well, I would argue that it probably once was. | ||
| Remember, the GOP also has, as a part of its roots, a libertarian threat, a very strong libertarian threat. | ||
| I've always been amused at those who would argue about the limited role of government On one issue, but then argue for the expansion of government on another issue. | ||
| Right, so that's this, right? | ||
| So, being authentically consistent for me is very important. | ||
| It's like when people ask me about my views on life, and I tell them, I say, well, I'm pro-life, I'm very much pro-life, and a lot of that has to come from how I was raised, it comes from my faith tradition. | ||
| Uh, and how I've been taught and, and come to believe in value in life. | ||
| So, when it comes to the death penalty, I'm against it. | ||
| And I always get, well, how can you be against the death penalty? | ||
| Well, because I'm pro-life. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, so you've got to be consistent from beginning to the end. | ||
| And that's not what we see happening today. | ||
| Yeah, do you, can you think of a politician off the top of your head that's consistent, actually, that really is, is governing off a real set of, I can't think of anybody. | ||
| I mean, can you think of anyone? | ||
| Can any of you think of anyone? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Anyone that's governing off that? | ||
| Because they're not allowed to. | ||
| They're not allowed to do it because the tensions inside both caucuses, caucai, are such, Latin coming back, is so intense that, look, I grew up in D.C. | ||
| The nation's capital has been in my backyard forever, and so I remember Washington when it was fun to be in Washington, and you could go when I was a kid. | ||
| I used to go sit on the Capitol steps at 11 o'clock. | ||
| When I was in high school with my buddies, we'd grab a liter of Coke and a bag of chips. | ||
| The soda, the soda. | ||
| I'm just seeing what principles you're guided by. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| See, I threw in leader of coke because I used to say, we used to grab some coke and a bag of chips and people would look at me. | ||
| I'm like, no, soda. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| So I got some, you know, we would sit there, but we would sit on the steps where you hang out with the Capitol Police and all, so, and you'd see members coming back and they'd talk. | ||
| You go to restaurants in town and you could see a table where, you know, a conservative or a Democrat or Republican, they weren't conservative, liberal, there was a Republican or Democrat would be off talking policy or just shooting the breeze. | ||
| You don't see that now. | ||
| They don't mix. | ||
| They don't talk. | ||
| They don't integrate. | ||
| They don't want to be a part of this. | ||
| They don't bring their families here. | ||
| They go back to their districts, which they should do, but there's this disconnect. | ||
| And the consequence of that is what we see now. | ||
| There's no reason for me to work with you. | ||
| I remember when I was chairman and we were doing, getting ready for the 2010 election. | ||
| Of course, you're going out, you're meeting candidates and you're sort of interviewing them to see who you want to line up and support and who you, eh, not so much. | ||
| And I met this one candidate, and we got into a nice conversation, you know, solid rock-ribbed conservative, and he's coming, he's firing brimstone, ready to come to Washington. | ||
| And so we were talking, and I said something about, well, you know, when you get to D.C., you know, because at that time the Dems were still in charge, I said, you know, one of the real interesting challenges is going to be working with the leadership on the other side and working with Democrats. | ||
| Oh, I'm not doing that. | ||
| I said, excuse me, you're not doing that. | ||
| I said, why are you coming to Washington? | ||
| He said, I'm not coming here to work with Democrats. | ||
| That's the attitude. | ||
| And that's, we got, that was doubled down with the Tea Party, right? | ||
| And that's, it's a lot of things. | ||
| It's not just Tea Party. | ||
| A lot of people put a lot of pressure on Tea Party, and the Tea Party came into being on | ||
| my watch, so I know very well what was the essence of that in that time. | ||
| But what people don't recognize is that movement, such as it is, that energy, started way before | ||
| 2009. | ||
| This goes back to 2004. | ||
| This goes back to 2002. | ||
| Big government republicanism, the spending on the war, the Terry Shivo case. | ||
| Remember the Terry Shivo case? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, oh yeah. | |
| When the Republicans called the Senate back into session to pass a bill to prevent this family from making a decision about this poor woman who was in a coma. | ||
| Again, these are the people that want government out of your life, supposedly. | ||
| Right, so this again, so on the one hand, you say, you know, government should be out of the way, but then the other, you're going to call Congress into session to pass a bill to tell someone what they can't do in this instance. | ||
| That's the conundrum that the parties put itself. | ||
| So who do you like out of this group? | ||
| You know, I met you a couple weeks ago in the spin room at the GOP debate, and I was able to ask Scott Walker a question. | ||
| And I asked him about campaign finance. | ||
| And I gotta tell you, sometimes you look at someone and you go, this guy's dumb. | ||
| I mean, he struck me as dumb. | ||
| I could just see it, you know what I mean? | ||
| I could just look in him and see, this is not a bright guy. | ||
| Now, you don't have to comment on that specifically. | ||
| I'm not gonna comment on that. | ||
| But he's not dumb. | ||
| Look, he's won a lot of elections. | ||
| He's won more elections than any of those guys. | ||
| But what do you think of the general crop? | ||
| I think the general crop overall is a very strong group of individuals. | ||
| You look at the governors that are in the race, or were in the race. | ||
| You look at the senators. | ||
| Carly Fiorina, very successful businesswoman. | ||
| Carly, Ben Carson, very successful neurosurgeon. | ||
| So it's a diverse group. | ||
| It is the most diverse field we've put up ever. | ||
| Not just in terms of a woman, an African American, all that, but just in terms of background and experience, the depth of it. | ||
| George, Jeb Bush was a very successful, did a good job as governor in Florida, elected strongly two times. | ||
| John Kasich, same thing in Ohio, went through hell in the first term and weathered that storm. | ||
| What did you make of Kasich's answer to the gay marriage question in the first debate? | ||
| I thought it was a beautiful thing. | ||
| For me, that was an authentically Republican response. | ||
| That's the, that, and Jeb Bush, when he talked about immigration, again, an authentically Republican response. | ||
| Because at the end of the day, what Jeb was saying, and he used a language that people could understand. | ||
| He didn't come at it in policy and political ease. | ||
| He used the word love. | ||
| Which, to me, and to a whole lot of people, was a recognition of people behind the policy. | ||
| That while you can sit back and talk all this smack about, you know, we're gonna build walls, and we're gonna electrify them, and we're gonna do all this crap, at the end of the day, there are people behind that. | ||
| And if you don't appreciate that, Then you don't have a good policy. | ||
| It's not a smart policy, and I think that that was something my takeaway in his discussion, which I thought was a very humble and a very personal way to talk about immigration. | ||
| No one ever talked about it on either side in those terms, and I thought He did well by that. | ||
| So in a way, you kind of want to combine these guys. | ||
| If you could combine a couple of the issues into some Frankenstein candidate. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, well, we're doing pretty good on the Frankenstein part without the combination, but I think, no, I think that in a real sense, you're right. | ||
| I mean, what I'm looking for at the end of the day, I like John Kasich, I like Jeb, I mean, I like a lot of these guys, but what I'm looking for, and I've said this from the very beginning of the cycle, I'm looking for someone who's prepared to sacrifice their race for the presidency. | ||
| That's what it's going to take. | ||
| In other words, and Jeb got close. | ||
| He used the words when he said, I'm willing to lose the primary to win the general. | ||
| But really sit there and go, you know what, America? | ||
| This is it. | ||
| Let's just cut the crap. | ||
| You want too much and we can't deliver. | ||
| That's how the conversation starts. | ||
| Because it gets you into spending, it gets you into programs, it gets you into the size of government, it gets you into policy, it gets you into everything. | ||
| We are our own worst enemies as Americans. | ||
| Because what do we say, folks? | ||
| We say, cut spending! | ||
| Less government! | ||
| I want more in my paycheck! | ||
| And then in the next sentence, why don't you put more money in that program? | ||
| Why aren't you spending more on this? | ||
| Why aren't you giving to this cause over here? | ||
| What do you want? | ||
| So the question for me is always boiled down very simply, and you know the model. | ||
| You did a little economics in school, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I did. | |
| Not well, but I did. | ||
| You know the whole idea of guns and butter. | ||
| And it was always you can either have guns or you can have butter. | ||
| Well, I think there's a different model where you can actually have both. | ||
| But the only way you get to have both is by prioritizing. | ||
| Because in any given moment, at any given time, something is going to be the priority. | ||
| So that's what we focus on. | ||
| Let's address that. | ||
| So that means we're going to spend a little bit less on guns today and more on butter because we need to put people back to work. | ||
| We need to make sure that hospitals stay open. | ||
| We need to make sure that, oh gee, that bridge is falling down. | ||
| We need to fix it. | ||
| Alright? | ||
| That's the priority. | ||
| So we put a little bit more into that. | ||
| At another time, the priorities may shift. | ||
| Whether it's something that happens overseas, ISIS gets more stupid than they already are, whatever, you've got to deal with that. | ||
| Then maybe we spend a little bit less, we reprioritize, and we don't do that. | ||
| The second thing is, government gets out and it says, look, we're going to impose these restrictions, we're going to make you do this, and we're going to give you all this stuff. | ||
| Alright, fine. | ||
| I'm happy with that. | ||
| Great. | ||
| People like stuff. | ||
| People like stuff. | ||
| But no one ever goes back to see or find out how the stuff is working. | ||
| And whether or not the program that you've designed, No Child Left Behind, actually works for teachers in the classroom. | ||
| Or whether, you know, the institution that you've created, our social safety net, in all of its various forms, actually meets the needs of the people who are supposed to be treated. | ||
| I'm thinking right now the VA. | ||
| So, again, making government accountable for all of that is important, but also the role that we play in that process is equally important. | ||
| Because what's happened now is our politicians, you're telling them every different thing. | ||
| And so if you come at this way, you come at this way, you come at this way, what happens? | ||
| They just stand still. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they do nothing. | ||
| And then they don't, they're not governed by a basic set of principles that you talked about earlier, so they're going every which way. | ||
| So they're going every which way and they're giving everybody anything and they're just sitting there going, well that's what you want and I'm done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's not what we want ultimately. | ||
| We're actually looking for someone to take the risk, which is the bottom line point. | ||
| Are you prepared to take the risk? | ||
| To do the job. | ||
| So, when I was Lieutenant Governor, my approach to being Lieutenant Governor was, I only have four years to do this job. | ||
| Because the other four aren't guaranteed. | ||
| And they weren't, because I didn't win the election. | ||
| But I walked out having reformed our minority business enterprise, got charter school passed in the state, and worked on a number of initiatives, including the death penalty that the governor asked me to work on. | ||
| And I felt that we had done the job the people had sent us to do. | ||
| Now, the politics took over in that case, and that's the risk. | ||
| You know, the governor of Maryland, my buddy Bob Ehrlich, got fired with a 62% job approval on election day. | ||
| But, you know, people hated Republicans in 2006 because of the war and a lot of other things. | ||
| So, but you do the job. | ||
| You can't think about the next election. | ||
| And right now our politicians are more concerned about being primaried or losing an election And they don't do the job. | ||
| Yeah, so that's really where I want to go with this, but do you want the 30 seconds to do Trump, or should we just... No, we can do Trump! | ||
| Alright, 30 seconds, go. | ||
| What do you make of this thing? | ||
| Trump is an enigma wrapped in a question mark wrapped in... I mean, he's a lot of... Wrapped in a wig. | ||
| Wrapped in a wig. | ||
| He's all these things... He's all these things that have upset the status quo of American politics. | ||
| Everybody wants to run a conventional campaign Except Trump. | ||
| He's running an unconventional campaign. | ||
| Everybody else is running a conventional campaign in an unconventional time. | ||
| And they don't know how to deal with it or what to do with it. | ||
| And whether or not he gets the nomination, all of that remains to be seen. | ||
| Folks, we're a long way from the first vote being cast. | ||
| We're away from the election? | ||
| Doesn't that seem crazy? | ||
| No, but we're actually only three months away from the first primary caucus votes and that's where the real rubber begins to meet the road. | ||
| That's when voters actually have to go into a caucus room like this or in a voting booth and actually think about who they're going to give this next charge to to be the president. | ||
| And I think that dynamic, as you get through this third debate and the fourth debate in December, and then into January, will begin to settle. | ||
| But Trump has changed the way we do this. | ||
| And I think that's good. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| You know, I talk to people all across the country. | ||
| They don't like what he said about Mexicans. | ||
| They don't like the way he talks about women. | ||
| They don't like a lot about Trump. | ||
| But you know, every sentence that starts like that, The next word is but. | ||
| I don't like what he said, but. | ||
| I don't appreciate that, but. | ||
| And I keep telling folks in DC, as long as they're saying but, Then anything can happen. | ||
| Anything can happen. | ||
| So is that the interesting thing about both parties right now? | ||
| Because Trump and Bernie, to me, are hitting on the same thing, which is that the system is broke. | ||
| I mean, in the first debate, Trump basically said, he said, yeah, I gave Hillary a lot of money, and she showed up at my wedding, because that's how politicians operate, right? | ||
| Yeah, he told the truth! | ||
| And Bernie, he's telling the truth on that side, so you have the capitalist, Right? | ||
| The poster child for capitalism. | ||
| Capitalism and socialism. | ||
| And the poster child for socialism. | ||
| And those are the two that are making the waves. | ||
| So what do you make of it? | ||
| Oh, there's your ticket next year. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Sanders versus Trump. | ||
| 2016. I want to be at that party. I'm gonna have myself a gin and tonic and | ||
|
unidentified
|
2016. | |
| some popcorn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Can you imagine the two of them? | ||
| I mean, really, like in the debate, if it was the two of them, because Bernie is completely unfiltered, Trump's off his rocker, I mean, it would be something, right? | ||
| No, wait a minute. | ||
| So why is Bernie unfiltered and Trump off his rocker? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because Bernie is a politician. | |
| Why can't Trump be unfiltered, too? | ||
| Well, no, Trump is unfiltered, but there's nothing beneath the filter, right? | ||
| Trump's just saying shit. | ||
| Tell that to all the people who are following him. | ||
| I've been trying to tell them. | ||
| They're not listening. | ||
| But you're actually making the more important point that folks keep missing. | ||
| It's that attitude that's pissing everybody off. | ||
| well i think that attitude is that attitude that's pissing everybody off | ||
| you think you know better than the person who's following him | ||
|
unidentified
|
and that's that's just not a lot of that that's just not right | |
| You've got to respect it. | ||
| That's where our politics has gotten to. | ||
| We've stopped respecting the fact that I can follow you because I actually like what you're saying even though you think he's full of shit. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| But that's the American process. | ||
| So I'm with you on that. | ||
| I get to do that, you don't get to judge it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm with you on that. | |
| And if you do, don't judge it out loud because then I may hit you. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| So I'm with you on that. | ||
| That's what the country's saying. | ||
| So I'm with you on that. | ||
| But to me, Trump, this isn't a real candidacy. | ||
| How do you know that? | ||
| I just don't think so. | ||
| Why do you say that? | ||
| We'll revisit this in a month, maybe. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| He's filed the paperwork. | ||
| He's disclosed his income. | ||
| He's got a campaign organization. | ||
| Trust me, this brother's got a campaign organization in a number of states that people don't even know he's got a campaign organization in. | ||
| He's doing the things... Look, you know what was a telling moment? | ||
| I don't know if how many of you caught it. | ||
| Remember when he rolled out his economic plan? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What did you notice about what he did? | ||
| Anybody? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was at Trump Tower. | |
| It's everything's at Trump Tower. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He had no cards. | ||
| Yes, it was the first time. | ||
| He did not read off the top of his head. | ||
| He read off a prepared text. | ||
| Trump is in this thing the right way. | ||
| Everything he's done up to now has gotten your attention. | ||
| And now he's rolling out a little policy on this, a little policy... I'm telling you, watch it, because the attitude of the folks in Washington about his campaign Is the thing that keeps him in the campaign. | ||
| Yeah, I get that. | ||
| I mean, I do get that. | ||
| I know you hate hearing that, but it's true. | ||
| All right, so, well, I can hear something and be... That's true. | ||
| Yeah, look, Huffington Post says they're not going to write about him in the politics session, and right, that gets the base angry. | ||
| All right, so that was the longest 30 seconds ever. | ||
| I know. | ||
| So let's just talk about the system of politics, because you're an insider and an outsider. | ||
| So when you were the chairman of the Republican Party, How much of the job, how much of your day-to-day was just about money? | ||
| Because that's what this is really all about. | ||
| Okay, so let's be clear. | ||
| The role of any party chairman, Democrat, Republican, county, state, national, is two things. | ||
| They only have two things. | ||
| Raise money and win elections. | ||
| If you don't do that, you're not doing your job. | ||
| So your day is made up of doing those two things. | ||
| That is 80% of your day on a good day, where you will spend anywhere from two to four hours dialing for dollars. | ||
| They're very few of us like doing because it's just tough to raise a look. | ||
| I'm calling. | ||
| I'm asking you for $38,000. | ||
| OK, there's a lot of presumption in that conversation. | ||
| Right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And because that's the maximum you can give. | ||
| Do they give you a list? | ||
| I mean, right when you get there first day, they're like, here's the list, get on the phone. | ||
| I was elected on a Friday, and that Monday I went up to New York and did a town hall on healthcare and the economy, and that Tuesday I was at my desk, officially for the first time at the desk, And I did three and a half hours worth of calls for donors. | ||
| Now what I did was, it was the idea was I needed to introduce myself to these folks because I'm the new kid on the block. | ||
| And you know, for some of them I was a little bit more of a shock than they anticipated. | ||
| And so it was more introduction. | ||
| But then, yeah, you kind of roll into it. | ||
| And I actually had a donor cuss me out and said, you know, I'm so sick of the party. | ||
| Every time I hear from you people is when you call asking for money. | ||
| I'm not giving you another damn dime, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. | ||
| And I let him vent. | ||
| This brother went on for like 20 minutes. | ||
| And I let him talk. | ||
| And then I said, well, actually, I wasn't calling to ask for money. | ||
| I was just calling to introduce myself. | ||
| But you wouldn't have said no to the money? | ||
| He wasn't giving any money. | ||
| But this was the point, and this is another important lesson of how I think you do this right. | ||
| So I listened to this man, because here is a long-time donor, an activist in the party, a supporter, who is now ticked off at its leadership, at the political operations, and wants no part of it. | ||
| So I told him, I said, well, look, I tell you, I'm putting together a business plan, which is what I did. | ||
| I put together a business plan for the party. | ||
| We've got to raise money, and this is how we're going to spend it. | ||
| These are things that are our priorities. | ||
| And I got that together over a period of time. | ||
| But I told him I was doing it. | ||
| I also laid out to him what I wanted to do, what my vision was. | ||
| And I told him, look, I don't want your money. | ||
| I said, you wait and see if I do the job to your satisfaction. | ||
| And if you feel like giving, give us a check. | ||
| Two weeks later, he sent the check for the maximum amount. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because, and he told me in his note, he said, you listened to me. | ||
| You took the time to listen to me. | ||
| And so, I thought about that. | ||
| And that is a big difference. | ||
| Listening to people goes so far. | ||
| And so, the money piece is a big part of it. | ||
| Now, I believe money is property. | ||
| I just generally do. | ||
| That's my philosophical view. | ||
| Like anything else I own, I should be free to do with it as I wish. | ||
| That doesn't say there shouldn't be limitations. | ||
| This is great. | ||
| You'll love this. | ||
| So, the RNC had A lawsuit in that I took over when I became chairman to basically peel back on McCain-Feingold because McCain-Feingold took away from the parties the ability to raise the money, alright? | ||
| And they created this system that we have and of course there was a companion lawsuit. | ||
| Guess what it was? | ||
| Put more money in? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| What was the companion lawsuit? | ||
| Anyone? | ||
| Supreme Court rejected my lawsuit and picked up Citizens United. | ||
| So Citizens United was the case they decided to take over, the one that had given the money, allowed donors to give untold sums, as they used to, to the state parties, to the national parties, and the state parties, and they decided to go down this road where you could set up these 527s, which we are now living through as a nightmare. | ||
| Yeah, so I want to get to that in just a sec, but I think everyone wants to know, how much does the money, how much influence does it actually get you? | ||
| So someone writes a $38,000 check, or someone writes... You get some shrimp. | ||
| Yeah, I mean really, what do you really get? | ||
| Well, again, separating the party from the candidate. | ||
| When you write a check to the RNC, we're going to take care of you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because that's what we do. | ||
| That's what we're supposed to do. | ||
| And what does that mean? | ||
| When you call up and want to talk to the chairman, you get to talk to the chairman. | ||
| Now, you don't bring issues to me because we're political. | ||
| We're not policy. | ||
| So you can, and some do. | ||
| I mean, I've got buckets of ideas that people like, hey, I think we should do this. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| But that's a separate way to operate. | ||
| That's all political. | ||
| You know it. | ||
| It's what it is. | ||
| We whine you. | ||
| We dine you. | ||
| We take you out. | ||
| And we do big fundraisers. | ||
| We do small fundraisers. | ||
| We're in your home. | ||
| All of that's part of that. | ||
| And of course, the access you get. | ||
| So when you have convention, guess what? | ||
| You're going to be taken care of because you're a major donor to the party. | ||
| Yeah, you're going to be invited to the suite. | ||
| You're going to get a chance to meet the nominee's family and all of that stuff. | ||
| That's what we do. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with that. | ||
| We've been doing that since the days of Jefferson and Washington and all those guys, alright? | ||
| So that's not unusual. | ||
| What's changed now is this dynamic where you have organizations that can be created that ostensibly don't talk to the candidate. | ||
| Right, which we know is complete bullshit, right? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, everybody, you know, my former chief of staff is now in the head of my super PAC. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You don't think I'm talking to this guy at some point? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Alright, so we'll go with the lie. | ||
| We'll go with the fiction that it doesn't happen. | ||
| But what it does do is, and I have to be honest with everyone, I'm still evolving in a way on this subject because of how I view money generally. | ||
| But money in politics, and I see what it is doing, is making it harder, it is becoming more of a distraction. | ||
| At the end of the day, whether you're Rupert Murdoch or some other big liberal or conservative donor, You get one vote. | ||
| You get one vote. | ||
| You know, you don't get, you know, 38,000 votes because you wrote a check for $38,000. | ||
| So you get one vote. | ||
| But now you can put a lot of money to put a lot of ads on Fox or CNN or MSNBC that influence a lot of other people. | ||
| Well, you know, okay, so let's talk about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you, are you really influenced by political ads? | |
| Anyone? | ||
| I mean, do you, if you saw an ad tearing him down, if he's a candidate for office and saying that, you know, he hates puppies, do you, not true, do you really, do you really walk away from that ad thinking he hates puppies? | ||
| I really do. | ||
| My grandmother does. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And she votes. | |
| That's my point. | ||
| I'm not saying it doesn't work, but what I'm saying, and Willie Horton, by the way, was originally a Democrat ad in their primary, so we won't have that conversation. | ||
| That's a whole other discussion. | ||
| I know they like to put that on our doorstep, but let's go to the origins of the Willie Horton ad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But you're right. | |
| It works. | ||
| So what does that say about us? | ||
| What does that say about you, the consumer? | ||
| My point is, this is the yin and the yang. | ||
| So the political class takes advantage of it as much as they can because they know a negative ad is going to work no matter how much you protest against it, no matter how much you hate it, you're going to sit there like this. | ||
| Wow, did you see that? | ||
| And now today you're going to tweet about it and you're going to send it out. | ||
| So they know that. | ||
| They play to that. | ||
| And that's part of the problem. | ||
| And the money does that. | ||
| What I tried to do as chairman, and we were moderately successful in the last cycle, in 2012. | ||
| We set it up in my term in 2009 and 2010. | ||
| I saw down the road that money was going to be an issue, particularly after the Supreme Court rejected my case and took Citizens United. | ||
| So we wanted to design a system so that you could actually participate without necessarily having to have a lot of money. | ||
| And we saw that with Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and a number of candidates in the 2012 cycle who didn't have Mitt Romney's bankroll. | ||
| But because of the way the system was designed, they had time to get their idea out there. | ||
| And those ideas began to resonate. | ||
| And that's when the money came to them after the fact. | ||
| So there is this dynamic that you can play around with. | ||
| Right now, as I will argue and agree with you, it's distorted. | ||
| And there needs to be a reassessment of how we use money in politics. | ||
| And right now, I think it's used poorly because Uh, it's just way, way too much of it. | ||
| Yeah, so last question about, about money. | ||
| Do you think both parties treat it the same? | ||
| I think there's a sense, and this may be just a meme that's out there... Politically? | ||
| Yeah, that, you know, that the Koch brothers run the Republican Party. | ||
| There's more of like, there's these evil Mr. Burns guys that are running the party. | ||
| More than, say, the Democrats. | ||
| I, I'm a firm believer that it's equal. | ||
| How much money did Hollywood, how much money did the unions, how much money did individual wealthy donors give Barack Obama? | ||
| Barack Obama, who as a U.S. | ||
| Senator was up on the Senate floor beating the hell out of Republicans over campaign finance reform, talking all this smack about, oh yeah, you know, take the public money until he got a big ass check. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, when it came time to make that decision, what did his campaign decide to do? | ||
| They didn't take public money in 2008 like McCain did. | ||
| What did they do? | ||
| They took all the super PAC money, even though they weren't super PACs. | ||
| They took all that money out of Hollywood. | ||
| They took all that money off of Wall Street. | ||
| So don't talk to me about money in the Republican Party. | ||
| You're talking about money in the political system. | ||
| That's the reality because both sides love it. | ||
| Both sides suck at that teat every single day, politically, and maybe otherwise. | ||
| And that's the reality that we're now having to live with. | ||
| So, you know, talk about big money, it's just now manifesting itself in a different form. | ||
| Because for 40 years, when the unions in Hollywood were backing Democrats, Republicans weren't, I mean, we didn't have all these big players the way we do now. | ||
| We didn't have the Koch brothers back in Ronald Reagan's day or in the 1970s. | ||
| So the dynamic has changed a little bit. | ||
| Well, it's actually changed a lot. | ||
| But the thread, the meme, is the same. | ||
| And that is money still plays a role in politics. | ||
| The question that we need to ask ourselves, again, in setting up our scales of priorities, Is how do we prioritize its role? | ||
| Because if you're going to go to a public financing system, then you need to account for races that are in markets like this market here in L.A. | ||
| that is damned expensive versus a market in Utah or a market in southwest corner of South Carolina. | ||
| Is this an example where Obama really has dropped the ball? | ||
| Because even just yesterday, he went to Oregon, where the shooting was a couple days ago, and do you guys know where he went right after that? | ||
| He went to a fundraiser. | ||
| He says that all the time! | ||
| I mean, think about that. | ||
| It's like almost after every national tragedy, he goes to a fundraiser. | ||
| I don't know who's scheduling this guy. | ||
| So this is a second-term president with only a year left, who after this horrific tragedy... I don't know who he's raising money... who's he raising money for? | ||
| I guess for the party, right? | ||
| Debbie says they're broke, so I don't know. | ||
| But isn't that the most emblematic thing of what's going on here? | ||
| That even a two-term president, on his way out, goes to a tragedy and then at the end of the day, his day was spent raising money. | ||
| And not even for himself. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think that is something that really sticks in the craw of a lot of people. | ||
| And I can tell you, as many conservatives and libertarians are as annoyed about that as are liberals and progressives. | ||
| And so it is an American phenomenon that we invest so much of our politics and having money to do politics. | ||
| When you look at the way politics is executed around the globe, they don't come anywhere near what we spend to elect someone to office. | ||
| You think about how much money a candidate running for, I was with a candidate yesterday in New Hampshire. | ||
| Looking at a congressional race. | ||
| Ask them how much it's going to run. | ||
| How much it's going to cost them in New Hampshire. | ||
| Two million dollars! | ||
| In New Hampshire. | ||
| For a job that pays $178,000 a year. | ||
| When I ran for the U.S. | ||
| Senate in 2006, my race was the most expensive race in the state of Maryland up to that point for federal office, and I raised $10 million for a U.S. | ||
| Senate race. | ||
| Today, for 2016, that race is now about a 15 to 20 million dollar race. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Why? | ||
| And no one stops to ask the question, to answer the question, why? | ||
| Why is it that expensive? | ||
| I think these guys ask it. | ||
| Well, they do. | ||
| And they're right to. | ||
| And they need to continue to ask it because, you know, it is having, I think, a very downward, depressive effect on our politics. | ||
| It brings out the cynicism in all of us because you just see a very small group of people who are getting to play. | ||
| And you're the one paying the taxes. | ||
| You're the one trying to make it from paycheck to paycheck. | ||
| You're the one who's trying to deal with all this crap that spews out of state capitals and federal government. | ||
| And you just feel that your access is somehow limited and cut off. | ||
| And no American should feel that way, in my view. | ||
| Alright, enough about money. | ||
| It's important, and we could talk about it forever. | ||
| It is important, but it's one of those things, you tell me how you get it out of the game. | ||
| How do you get it out of the game at this point? | ||
| Under the current rules, because as long as you've got a Citizens United out there, where you, you, you, and you can get together and decide we're going to form a PAC. | ||
| And it may not be for Candidate A or Candidate B. You just want to form a PAC, and you just want to play. | ||
| And you're going to go to the rest of the universe, and you can now raise untold millions of dollars. | ||
| And we don't need to know who any one of you are. | ||
| You can stroke a check for $10 million right now, and your name will never show up on any report in Washington. | ||
| Do we really want that system? | ||
| I believe very, again, going back to my, and we can then move on, going back to my central argument, money is property. | ||
| So I can do with my property whatever I want, right? | ||
| So if I want to write your campaign a $10 million check, I'll write, I should be allowed to do it, but here's the caveat, here's the catch. | ||
| The day I write it, the next morning, the next hour, the next minute, it is fully disclosed. | ||
| Period. | ||
| My name, what I do, the amount, the nature of my business, so that everyone in the universe knows who's giving to you. | ||
| And then that puts the onus on you, the politician. | ||
| Because if you want to be associated with my money, and all that comes with it, guess what? | ||
| You'll take it. | ||
| But if you don't, Guess what? | ||
| You won't. | ||
| And that will have a chilling effect, because right now, if you don't know that I'm doing something that harms the environment, or otherwise is a negative, for example, No one in the universe will ever know it, except you, when you write the check. | ||
| When you get the check. | ||
| I'm pretty sure the politicians like the plausible deniability on that. | ||
| Of course they do! | ||
| Alright, so moving away from money, so I want to talk about foreign policy a little bit, because to me it should be a Republican, this should be a go-to Republican issue, and we're in a freaking mess right now. | ||
| I mean, I don't think the American public really realizes what a disaster... Well, why should it be a go-to Republican issue? | ||
| The executive branch sets the foreign policy, so why is this a... | ||
| Sure, but there's the idea that Republicans are stronger in foreign policy, and we have such a meltdown right now in the Middle East. | ||
| We gave that up a while ago. | ||
| Clearly, clearly. | ||
| We gave that position up a while ago when we started making some really boneheaded decisions about how we engage. | ||
| Right, so Iraq, I think, is boneheaded, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's just a bad policy. | ||
| You don't do nation-building. | ||
| No superpower since time began has been successful at nation-building. | ||
| It always collapses. | ||
| At some point, it falls down around your feet. | ||
| So where do you fall, then, on everything that's going on in the Middle East? | ||
| We tried to nation-build, right? | ||
| We know we went to the wrong war for the wrong reasons. | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
| Yeah, no, I agree. | ||
| And now, because of that, Iraq, but especially Syria, they're not functioning states in any way that we define a state. | ||
| Well, yeah, you look at it in two parts. | ||
| In the first part, we all know the history. | ||
| We all know how we got here. | ||
| All right, so that's stipulated. | ||
| We all know how we got here. | ||
| And I think generally everyone, including candidates now running for president on the GOP side, some begrudgingly, some less so, admit that we got here the wrong way. | ||
| All right, so we're in a bad space for the wrong reasons. | ||
| All right, so now the test of this time is how do we go forward? | ||
| And how do we, what do we learn from the mistake? | ||
| And then how do we not make it again? | ||
| But more importantly, how do we position the United States vis-a-vis our allies, like Israel and Saudi Arabia, who, you know, represent Two opposing problems for the U.S. | ||
| and our enemies, like Iran, which I really don't even want to use that term because that's a little strong, you know, that's a little strong because it's not, I don't think it's their, you know, I don't think it's that kind of relationship. | ||
| Didn't we just give them $150 billion? | ||
| I have to say, I don't think it's that kind of relationship. | ||
| And the strategic relationship we need to have with Russia and China, who are big players in the Middle East, but so are the French. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So are the Brits. | ||
| So where does that leave us as a nation? | ||
| Because it seems to me that we go in, we try something, we always screw it up, and now we leave and we see what that does. | ||
| I mean, it's a real mess there, and we created it, so I feel like there's a guilt sort of associated with Americans. | ||
| We feel like we have to do something, and yet we know, no matter what we do, we somehow make it worse. | ||
| And now Russia's jumping in. | ||
| Great, and you know, we can argue the point, but I think there are enough examples of either hesitation by this administration, the Obama administration, reticence, or even just a lack of unawareness, which they even alluded to just recently about the maneuvers of Russia. | ||
| When you have State Department officials off the record saying, we just didn't see this coming, Dude, that's why you're there. | ||
| You're supposed to see this coming. | ||
| Or they called him J.V., right? | ||
| Or they called ISIS J.V. | ||
| a year ago. | ||
| But let me tell you what I think this goes back to. | ||
| This goes back to, believe it or not, to the 1970s, in my view. | ||
| When the church committee and the CARD administration sort of came to this conclusion that our intelligence organizations were somehow bad. | ||
| Now they, you know, CIA and all those guys, yeah, they had their fingers in some crazy pots and doing some crazy things. | ||
| We got that. | ||
| But I think what we have seen over time, whether it's Iran-Contra, whether it is what we're seeing right now in the Middle East, is a lack of intelligence on the ground, a lack of ability to actually know what the hell is going on. | ||
| And I don't just mean know who the bad players are, but know what nook and cranny they're in. | ||
| Know what their favorite cafe is. | ||
| Know what their favorite coffee or latte is. | ||
| Know who their kids... I mean, just that level of detail that was so much a part of the Cold War in terms of how the U.S. | ||
| and Russia sort of worked off of each other and knew what was going on. | ||
| And they were so effective at it that they created effectively a stalemate. | ||
| So whose fault is that, that we don't have that? | ||
| Oh, I think it's a combination of political leadership that sort of overreacted to bad things that some of these institutions get into and do. | ||
| You know, government is about overreaction. | ||
| It's about reaction. | ||
| It's not a proactive entity. | ||
| You think they sit around and say, so listen, how do we actually solve a problem before it starts? | ||
| That's not what they do. | ||
| So, you know, a Newtown happens. | ||
| A Columbine happens. | ||
| You know, a Freddie Gray happens. | ||
| These things happen and then the government wants to go, well, now we're going to come here and we're going to fix this for you. | ||
| Don't worry, we got this. | ||
| No, actually, no, just step out. | ||
| Just let the people on the ground deal with it. | ||
| So there's a little bit of that where they overreact, and they overreact in a way in which they actually wind up making it worse. | ||
| And in the process of overreacting, they begin to penalize the players in a way that prevents them from doing anything constructive later on. | ||
| Because now we're going to cut your funding for this, we're going to bring you in for all this here. | ||
| If they just did day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month oversight, They have committees called oversight. | ||
| Do they meet? | ||
| Do they actually do oversight? | ||
| Who's overseeing? | ||
| If you're doing this on an ongoing basis, And you're sort of, you're supporting and guiding those intelligence organizations. | ||
| A lot of the stuff that we've gotten ourselves into over the last 15, 20 years, some of that could have been avoided because we would have had the intelligence to know. | ||
| I mean, look at it this way. | ||
| You know, how many times have we seen in the political process when You don't have the count right on something, or you misidentified something, or you misbrand. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| There are no consequences from that. | ||
| So, the speaker didn't get that vote because the whip didn't count it right. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| We got that. | ||
| But when you're out in the field, when you're in a situation like Benghazi, for example, where you have cables from the people in the field saying, we need this support, and the folks in Washington want to have a meeting, About it. | ||
| That's where the things begin to break down. | ||
| And so this idea of having an ongoing accountable oversight process in which you are in the moment, real time, with what's going on, I think begins to alleviate the pressure on the executive branch and even the Congress To put itself in a position where, you know, we're talking about sending in troops and, you know, ratcheting up all this spending on, you know, in reaction to something that someone else has done. | ||
| I think that's a step. | ||
| So we're always playing catch-up, I think. | ||
| We're playing catch-up, and it's more complicated, I know, and there's a lot more to it, but it's, you know, I tell you, I've learned over the years in Washington and certainly watching some of these guys, it's always the simple stuff. | ||
| You know, it's the things that you don't Think are important or the things that you just kind of go. | ||
| Why are we why would we do that? | ||
| That's the thing you should do. Yeah to avoid a bigger problem later on | ||
| So one thing that's become like my main thing you you were sitting | ||
| On the panel on real time with Bill Maher. Yeah when Sam Harris was on | ||
| With Ben Affleck. I'm assuming most of you guys are probably familiar with what happened, but basically that | ||
| was so much. Yeah, I I mean, you saw, to me, what became a seminal moment and a split in the liberals between the progressives and what I consider the true liberals, which is where I fall. | ||
| But basically, Sam Harris said a few things about The difference between Islam and religion. | ||
| Sam Harris was making an intellectual argument based in research, based in... Pew polls. | ||
| He was quoting Pew polls. | ||
| And things like that. | ||
| So that's the jump off point. | ||
| Ben was making a progressive argument that, again, going back to the point I was making before about people | ||
| and how those pupils and all those numbers actually translate into people. | ||
| So when you start talking about people, then you're talking about attitudes and perceptions | ||
| and all of that. | ||
| And it was a very interesting dynamic, I thought. | ||
| So for the people that didn't see it, basically, Sam quoted a couple polls and then immediately Ben Affleck, he screamed, that's gross, that's racist. | ||
| That's racist. | ||
| And then that changes the dynamic. | ||
| The next day, every media outlet, the question was, you know, Ben Affleck calls Bill Maher and Sam Harris racist. | ||
| Suddenly the onus was on them to prove that they weren't racist. | ||
| So for you, I assume when someone throws around, you know, racist, you're a bigot, I assume you don't take those things lightly. | ||
| What was it like to be sitting there in the midst of that? | ||
| Especially because you guys weren't even supposed to be involved in the conversation, right? | ||
| Wasn't Bill supposed to talk to Sam? | ||
| That was the Bill and Sam moment. | ||
| And I saw Ben lean in and I went, oh hell, here we go. | ||
| And then he started and I've learned over these years that when two liberals are going at it, there's no need. | ||
| No need for the conservative to opine or contribute in any way. | ||
| You didn't say much, you didn't, right? | ||
| Christoph chimed in a little bit. | ||
| I'm just like, you guys work that out, let me know. | ||
| But what was your takeaway from that? | ||
| My takeaway from it was, and when I did speak, what I tried to get on the table was, you're both right. | ||
| And you're both reflecting exactly what's going on in the broader population. | ||
| That we see these numbers that reflect some events or what's going on. | ||
| We look at extreme actions by an extreme group of people and we pejoratively project it Over everybody in that particular class of people. | ||
| So you had this dynamic. | ||
| Even though you understood that Sam wasn't really doing that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, he wasn't. | |
| The message. | ||
| The message. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| No, Sam was not doing that. | ||
| Sam was just, you know, just looking at these are the numbers, this is what this is reflecting, this is what people are saying, this is what the poll says. | ||
| But this is, again, it speaks to the dynamic of our politics, of we immediately go to the personal. | ||
| It became intensely personal. | ||
| When you label the charge, or you throw out the charge, you're racist, or you even infer that, that's an intensely personal moment. | ||
| In that conversation, in which, when it comes my way, all bets are off because it's your ass and me now. | ||
| This is one-on-one. | ||
| Look, I've been called an Uncle Tom. | ||
| I've had Oreo cookies thrown at me. | ||
| I've gone through this. | ||
| I know what this ugliness in politics is about, and even more broadly. | ||
| And so, I thought Sam did very well to hold it and keep it from moving into the intensely personal, but Ben was intensely personal. | ||
| And that's because he carried passionately, and I think it speaks to, you can have that passion, but you need to know where the limits are. | ||
| You need to know where the limits are in the conversation, and you need to know how to conduct That passion in a way that your point is not lost. | ||
| Because it is still, and I thought he made a valid point. | ||
| Right, and we're so quick. | ||
| Because you don't want to project this pejorative view about a race of people, about a class of people, about any individual in a way. | ||
| And you certainly don't want to use statistics and numbers to do that. | ||
| I take great exception to the fact that whenever anyone starts talking about poverty, why do you immediately jump to black? | ||
| Why is the image that pops in your head when someone mentions poverty in this country is the image of a black person? | ||
| When you talk about crime in this country, the criminal element, why do you jump to my community? | ||
| We saw recently, even on the welfare question, some members of Congress getting in trouble because they were inferring that the folk, you know, we're going to solve welfare by, you know, working in the black... Do you know the majority of people in welfare in this country are white? | ||
| Have you been to Appalachia? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Seriously. | ||
| Because those people are hurting. | ||
| They don't live in an urban inner city. | ||
| Why is their pain and their suffering and their poverty less important for focus and emphasis? | ||
| Particularly when they're part of the majority. | ||
| So that's sort of the danger of identity politics, right? | ||
| That's the danger. | ||
| When you start pejoratizing and start speaking about a group of people in a way in which you clearly don't know what you're talking about. | ||
| Because you're not reflecting what's really going on. | ||
| I live in one of the wealthiest black count- THE wealthiest black county in the country. | ||
| Period. | ||
| So when you start talking about poverty, that's a whole different conversation when you come to Where I Live. | ||
| So you can't paint that, you can't use that brush the same way you use it when you're talking about the folks somewhere else. | ||
| So that's the problem people get into when they start doing Doing that, that sort of, you know, stereotyped conversation about white folks, black folks, poor folks, rich folks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| Well, they gave me the wrapping here. | ||
| So last thing I'm putting on the spot. | ||
| Why don't you jump back into politics? | ||
| Because I've sat here with you and exactly the reverse of what I saw with Scott Walker. | ||
| Really. | ||
| I mean, I know you believe in what you're saying. | ||
| I may not agree with you on everything, but you get the system and... I'll get back in. | ||
| You know, I like where I am right now because I get to get up every day and have a nice | ||
| cup of coffee and ask myself, "Who should I piss off today?" | ||
| And I don't have to have a meeting after I do that. | ||
| So I, you know, I kind of like the space. | ||
| I love the national dialogue. | ||
| I want to be a part of the national dialogue, as you are. | ||
| And I think that that's a good space right now, as long as, you know, I'm able to do it. | ||
| I appreciate MSNBC for giving this conservative voice an opportunity to kind of come out and say, you know, with my buddy Chris Matthews. | ||
| Okay, Chris, hold on just a second. | ||
| Can I talk now? | ||
| Can I get in? | ||
| Is he spitting as much as it appears when he's yelling? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It seems like there's a lot of spit. | |
| I love Hardball. | ||
| It's a great show. | ||
| It's a great political discussion, and he's a very smart guy, and it's a very smart, intelligent conversation, and we need a lot more of that in our politics. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, I hope you guys appreciate what I think was a smart, intelligent conversation. | ||
| I appreciate you guys coming out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| And thank you for being on the show. | ||
| I really appreciate it. |
Export Selection