Aug. 2, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Well, they were so fed up, like I was. | ||
| I'm a small business guy. | ||
| The previous governor, Martin O'Malley, had raised taxes 43 times in a row, and it had crushed our economy. | ||
| We had lost 10,000 businesses and 100,000 jobs, and people were fleeing the state in all directions. | ||
| It was frustrating to a lot of people and it was to me as a small business owner and it didn't matter what your party affiliation was, people were leaving. | ||
| And a Gallup poll came out that said 47% of all Marylanders wanted to leave the state. | ||
| And that was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back for me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report. | |
| As always, guys, don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel and click that notification bell. | ||
| And joining me today is the 62nd governor of the great state of Maryland and the author of Still Standing, Surviving Cancer, Riots, a Global Pandemic, and the Toxic Politics that Divide America. | ||
| Governor Larry Hogan, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Well, thank you, Dave. | ||
| It's really great to be with you. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| That is quite a title of a book. | ||
| I mean, you have got, that is a, your title is a book unto itself. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, you made it all the way through. | ||
| So I was impressed with that. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I've become a master of the teleprompter. | ||
| But actually I thought that would be an interesting place to start because the book is coming out this week and you actually made a whole bunch of additions to the book because of what's happening right now. | ||
| So I thought that might be the right spot for us to kick off here. | ||
| Yeah, Dave, it was already kind of a long title to begin with because we were trying to cover a lot of important topics, you know. | ||
| I was covering, when I was elected, kind of overcame, I was the biggest upset in America in 2014 in a very blue state. | ||
| I was immediately hit with the dealing with riots in Baltimore and then Life-threatening cancer and you know we a lot of interesting stories to write about I really wanted to talk a little bit It's not a heavy political read But I wanted to talk a little bit about you know the divisive politics today and some of my thoughts on where we ought to be heading And and we put together this book sort of you know | ||
| February time frame, when we were finished with it, and it was going to come out a little earlier, and then the pandemic, we kind of put it on hold and asked the publisher to hold it. | ||
| It would only hold it until now, and they asked us if we would add some more current activities, because I was dealing with this crisis, and we added about five chapters on the pandemic, and I think it makes it kind of more interesting, and I'm Tell some pretty straightforward stories about what we've been dealing with. | ||
| But I'm hoping people will find it interesting. | ||
| Yeah, so I wanna go into each of the specific topics that you break down in the title, but let's start with the pandemic stuff, because as you just mentioned, you are a Republican governor of a largely blue state. | ||
| If I'm not mistaken, only two Republican governors have ever been reelected in Maryland in its entire history. | ||
| So maybe we should start there first. | ||
| What's it like being an outsider governor Whether it's a red guy in a blue state or a blue guy in a red state, just what's that like first, before pandemic time, and then we'll talk about that. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm a lifelong small business guy. | ||
| Never held elective office until I was elected governor. | ||
| Yeah, our state has the highest Democratic registration of any state in America. | ||
| In 2014, I got elected. | ||
| It was kind of a shock. | ||
| I mean, nobody expected me to. | ||
| I came from nowhere. | ||
| We weren't even on the radar screen. | ||
| I was the least likely to succeed, I think. | ||
| Nobody thought I was going to be governor. | ||
| But I pulled together a coalition of You know all the few Republicans we had in our state along with a bunch of independents and Democrats and I got elected and then I'm governing in a state that's a fairly liberal Democratic state with a legislature that's 70% Democrats in both chambers. | ||
| Every single statewide elected official is a Democrat and only a second Republican Well, I think one of the things I've learned in a situation like that is that you've got to figure out a way to work with people on the other side of the aisle. | ||
| And it may be different if you're, say, a Republican in a red state. | ||
| Or you're a Democrat in a blue state, you don't have to develop those relationships and you don't have to maybe compromise or find a way to reach that middle ground, you know, where you can all work together. | ||
| So maybe out of necessity to get things done, I had to be more pragmatic. | ||
| And figure out how do you reach common sense solutions and actually fix some problems? | ||
| And it turns out that's what a lot of people seem to want because a lot of Democrats and Republicans and Independents seem to like it and they re-elected me and we seem to be making some progress. | ||
| Are you telling me that people vote you guys in to fix problems? | ||
| Is that what it's all about? | ||
| I know, Dave, it sounds like a strange concept in politics today, because we don't see a lot of that. | ||
| But I really do think it's what a lot of people want. | ||
| I mean, you know, we can talk about the politics on the right and the left. | ||
| I think most people, regardless of where they fall on the spectrum, they really do want The people they elect to office, regardless of which side of the aisle they come from, they just want people to get to work and get things done. | ||
| And I think they're frustrated with the political process and the fact that they see a lot of divisiveness and dysfunction. | ||
| They don't think people are getting the job done. | ||
| You mentioned that you were a small businessman before going into politics. | ||
| My sense is that the future of politics, probably on either side, although I think probably more on the Republican side, is that the day of the long-term politician, the guy who comes up through the system, and that the future will be people | ||
| who built their own businesses, who innovated, maybe were in the tech world, | ||
| that those will be the future politicians. | ||
| Do you think that gave you a unique way of looking at the world | ||
| that has been relevant for governing? | ||
| You know, well, first of all, I agree with you. | ||
| I think that is what we're going to see. | ||
| It's what we should see. | ||
| I mean, I've for a long time sort of been arguing against career politicians who spend their entire professional lives in elective office. | ||
| And I think it's what the founding fathers originally had in mind, you know, about People just leaving whatever it was they normally did and going in and serving for a while in public service. | ||
| Actually, I'm the chair of the National Governors Association and active in the Republican Governors Association. | ||
| A lot of my colleagues have similar profiles and backgrounds. | ||
| Not all of them, but many of them are not lifelong politicians. | ||
| Many of them have business backgrounds. | ||
| And I think it may be a sort of a new phenomenon, but I'm not alone in that regard. | ||
| And I think Maybe in the governor's races, you may send somebody off to Washington that's been a politician, but when you're deciding who the CEO or the chief executive is going to be to run your state, they want to pick somebody that's kind of competent and able to run things and get things done. | ||
| So you see a lot of business backgrounds in the folks that are running the states. | ||
| I think it's helped me a lot. | ||
| I mean, you know, I knew a little bit about government and I knew some stuff about politics, but the business background, you know, my whole career was about trying to, you know, bring people together to get things done, and it turns out that's actually a valuable thing to have in government, too. | ||
| You don't say. | ||
| Accomplishing stuff. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, strange. | ||
| Nobody ever figured that out before. | ||
| Do you find Maryland to be a particularly unique case these days because of the proximity to Washington, D.C., where so many of the longtime bureaucrats and the people that have just been in the system forever, a ton of them live in Maryland, obviously, and that maybe filters a little bit of what the political life is like there? | ||
| Maybe to a certain extent. I mean, a big, one of our largest population centers is in Metropolitan | ||
| Washington, but we're a pretty diverse state. You know, we've got the Washington Metropolitan | ||
| area, the Baltimore Metropolitan area, but we've got, you know, some, some pretty dense areas. | ||
| We've got, you know, but it's, we've got suburban areas, very rural areas of our state, about 70% | ||
| of our state is rural. And, And so we're kind of a microcosm. | ||
| I mean, we're a we're American miniature. | ||
| We have a little bit the same things that everybody has. | ||
| We have probably a higher percentage of federal government employees. | ||
| So we actually have more people that are in the private sector that maybe have some kind of government contracting affiliation. | ||
| But it may change. | ||
| We may a little bit more liberal and a little bit more democratic leaning as a result of that. | ||
| It made it more challenging for me to get elected, but we've been able to win over some of those folks, which is common sense. | ||
| What was going on there before you were elected that a blue state would say, oh, let's let this guy in who's not a career politician, who's cobbling together this kind of strange coalition? | ||
| Well, they were so fed up, like I was. | ||
| I'm a small business guy. | ||
| The previous governor, Martin O'Malley, had raised taxes 43 times in a row, and it had crushed our economy. | ||
| We had lost 10,000 businesses and 100,000 jobs, and people were fleeing the state in all directions. | ||
| It was frustrating to a lot of people, and it was to me as a small business owner. | ||
| It didn't matter what your party affiliation was, people were leaving. | ||
| A Gallup poll came out that said 47% of all Marylanders wanted to leave the state. | ||
| And that was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back for me. | ||
| We were 49th out of 50 states in economic performance. | ||
| So I was frustrated enough to do something crazy, like say, I've had enough, I'm going to run for governor. | ||
| And it was to the point where Democrats said, you know, I'm a lifelong Democrat. | ||
| I've never considered voting for a Republican in my life. | ||
| But this guy's starting to make sense. | ||
| And I focused on the economic issues and talked about You know, we were gonna cut taxes and regulations and focus on growing our private sector and trying to put more people back to work. | ||
| And it's exactly what we did. | ||
| We had the biggest economic turnaround in America. | ||
| We had more businesses open and put more people to work than ever before in the history of the state. | ||
| And we got things done even with our democratic legislature. | ||
| Do you think bottom line, when you get rid of all the other issues that you're dealing with all day, that if you as a governor can keep the economy chugging and keep people at work, that you've basically done your job? | ||
| Well, we, you know, we're wrestling with all kinds of really tough issues, Dave. | ||
| When you're governor of the state, as I mentioned, you know, we're dealing with a, you know, close to a $50 billion budget and, you know, 60 some thousand employees. | ||
| We have to provide all these different services. | ||
| There's so many different issues. | ||
| But really it is, we're dealing with educating folks and handling transportation and, you know, law enforcement, all these multitude of things. | ||
| But the focus that brought everybody together in our state that they could agree on, they could argue about various, you know, different issues. | ||
| But the one thing they all agreed on was the pocketbook issues. | ||
| And that's how I put together, I put a group together called Change Maryland. | ||
| It was a nonpartisan citizen organization. | ||
| And we had just as many Democrats and independents as Republicans. | ||
| And they were just saying, let's focus on these issues. | ||
| Let's not argue about all these other things right now. | ||
| Let's just focus on these and we brought together a coalition it turned out to be a winning coalition and and You know, they people say how did you get, you know suburban women and how do you get minorities? | ||
| And how do you get Democrats and independents to vote for a Republican? | ||
| But I think it's one of the things that Republican Party's gonna have to think about how do we reach out to a wider group of people in order to win elections in the future and so we can be in in the position of making decisions and Yeah, so I want to get more to that and the sort of pure political side in a minute, but let's talk about what's going on. | ||
| I didn't mean to get too political on you, Dave. | ||
| A governor getting political, I can't believe it. | ||
| Yeah, let's not do that anymore. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Let's talk about what's going on now, though, because, you know, there's been, I think the major conversation really at a high level is sort of what the federal government is supposed to do related to coronavirus and what the state governments are supposed to do. | ||
| I suspect I generally know your thoughts on this, but what do you think your job as a governor is right now? | ||
| And what is not your job? | ||
| What is the job of the federal government? | ||
| Well, that's a great question. | ||
| Look, I think the governors are on the front lines of this crisis, and we ought to be. | ||
| We are out there. | ||
| We're closest to the people's problems. | ||
| We're working together with our local governments, and we're trying to really address these issues that are on the ground in our individual states. | ||
| Each of our states are different and we're going after the different situations on the ground in our states. | ||
| But there were certain big things that only the federal government could do well. | ||
| Early on in this crisis, the federal government could have Taken more of a role in an overall testing strategy. They | ||
| did, you know, they were a little bit I think behind the eight ball on | ||
| In the early stages and I talked about this in my book a little bit in March and April | ||
| When they weren't taking it as seriously I mean there were people in the administration who were I | ||
| think the president downplayed it a little more than he should have and they | ||
| Didn't develop a lot of national strategies We had 50 individual state strategies. | ||
| I'm not saying states shouldn't have had the authority and independence to be able to make their own decisions, but certain things like we shouldn't have had 50 states competing with one another in a constrained market for desperately needed supplies, competing with the federal government and trying to You know, acquire things all over the world. | ||
| So on testing and contact tracing and some of the major issues that the power of the federal government could really have helped with the pandemic. | ||
| And in some respects, they're getting better, but certain things the federal government can just do better. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about how you specifically make decisions when it comes to lockdown or the rest of it? | ||
| Because as you know, I'm here in Los Angeles, California. | ||
| We've had rolling lockdowns. | ||
| Last week I was actually out to lunch for the first time in weeks, and as I was having lunch, we got the notification on my phone that said the restaurants are closing in two hours, now everything's closed again. | ||
| And I've been very critical of Gavin Newsom, our governor here, not necessarily because of what he's doing, rather than the messaging. | ||
| It seems like they just give edicts. | ||
| They never say, well, we've seen these numbers change this way. | ||
| We know this behavior changed this or that. | ||
| It's just, oh, now we're locking down. | ||
| We'll see you in August. | ||
| We'll see you in September. | ||
| And that's what I'm sort of more concerned about. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about how you message things and how you actually come to the decisions? | ||
| Yeah, it was a great question, Dave. | ||
| And you hit on a couple of really good points. | ||
| First of all, I agree that the messaging has been a problem. | ||
| I think a lot of the governors are not messaging very well. | ||
| And frankly, I think, That's where the president's biggest weaknesses have been on the messaging side. | ||
| I've tried to be just very direct and upfront and provide as much information as possible because I think most people, whether the news is good or bad, if you're just You know, frank with them and you supply the facts in a situation like this when we're dealing with, you know, in some cases, life and death matters in a serious health crisis and a global pandemic and an economic collapse substantially. | ||
| People want to know the facts and they want to know why you're making decisions. | ||
| So, you know, I think I'm not the only one doing it, but there are a number of the governors who have been more direct and open and transparent. | ||
| I think I've been the most successful. | ||
| On the decision-making process, we had to make decisions really quickly in this thing because it wasn't like we have deliberations with our legislature and let's talk about it and form a committee. | ||
| This was happening really fast at the beginning as we were spiking and we were seeing things happening in Italy and New York. | ||
| people dying and bodies stacked up and overflowing hospitals and we were hearing these things about two | ||
| million potential deaths and so we were It was speed time. It was of the essence to make some | ||
| decisions You had to make the right decisions quickly. You couldn't | ||
| hesitate, but I wanted to get the best advice I could from the smartest people | ||
| We put together a task force of really smart doctors and scientists and business people, and I just tried to get the best input, listen to everyone, and then make decisions without hesitating, and then communicate it really well to the people about, this is what we're doing and here's why, and here's how it's going to help. | ||
| And so we took very aggressive and early actions, Did things that I never would have imagined ever doing, but it helped us flatten the curve. | ||
| I mean, our numbers are really good. | ||
| Our economy is really good. | ||
| Uh, we took early and aggressive action. | ||
| We had a safe and effective reopening and, uh, you know, we're now, you know, way down from our peak that happened about more than 90 days ago. | ||
| We've opened up 98% of our economy and our unemployment at 8% is staggering, but it's, it's, you know, some states are two and a half times worse, better than the rest of the country. | ||
| And our numbers, well, we've had a number of deaths and we had the same problems other people had, we're in great shape right now. | ||
| Yeah, on a personal note, as a guy that didn't wanna always get into politics, when you have to make those decisions about, okay, we're gonna extend the lockdown, we're gonna lift the lockdown, whatever it may be, what's that like for you? | ||
| Because I think people think of politicians sort of as robots, like, oh, they just make the choices, but yeah. | ||
| No, it was really, really hard, Dave. | ||
| I've been through, and I talk about some of these personal and professional struggles and battles that I've been through in my book, and I share some of that. | ||
| What it was like, and all the things that I had to deal with on a personal level, or battles I went through as governor, or getting elected governor. | ||
| This was the hardest thing that I think I've had to deal with. | ||
| Something we never imagined dealing with and it wasn't just you know I went through a cancer battle where I was worried about how my family was gonna take it or you know what was I was dealing with other cancer patients but this was what I was worried about six million people in my state and my decisions were going to impact not only their health But I'm a lifelong small business guy, ran for governor with the sole purpose of creating jobs and helping small businesses. | ||
| And decisions I was going to make were going to impact, was going to cost people jobs and hurt their small businesses, or people were going to die. | ||
| It was a really hard situation to be put in. | ||
| And, and frankly, the president, Senator Steele left it up. | ||
| He said, it's up to the governors. | ||
| And we were getting, you know, You know, open up and then, you know, but you have to shut down. | ||
| The administration was giving us advice. | ||
| You have to do these things or we're going to have two million deaths. | ||
| And then, you know, messaging the opposite stuff the next day. | ||
| So it was we were in tough situations, but I think and everybody made different decisions. | ||
| But on a personal level, I mean, it's there's been very little sleep for five months and a lot of stress. | ||
| And you got people that are mad at you either way, no matter what you do, you can't make everybody happy. | ||
| And, you know, I just tried to do the very best I could based on the information I had and, you know, try to do the best thing for the people in the state. | ||
| Yeah, so let's talk about the other thing that's going on, because there is another thing going on. | ||
| There's always a lot of things, but there's sort of two main ones going on at the moment. | ||
| And the second one obviously is, I guess the best way you'd describe it is either the racial unrest or the protesting or the rioting, just the whole conversation we're having, the toppling of monuments. | ||
| Now again, you're in Maryland, D.C. | ||
| is right there, awful lot of monuments, awful lot of history is right in your backyard. | ||
| You know, you've got Baltimore there, which has its own set of problems. | ||
| I'm not even going to ask you a question. | ||
| I'm just going to pass all that off to you. | ||
| Take it away. | ||
| Yeah, well, we're just going to let me tee it up. | ||
| You know, you look at the title of the book, it's like riots, you know, the cancer riots. | ||
| Global pandemic. | ||
| I dealt with this, and I talk about this a lot, and there's real parallels to what's going on right now with the riots, the violence, the unrest, the protests. | ||
| However you want to describe it, there's a little bit of all of that going on across America in different cities. | ||
| In 2015, right after I became governor, we had, I'd only been governor for 89 days, and we had the worst violence in 47 years break out in our largest city in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray. | ||
| And, uh, you know, in the very first few hours in Baltimore city, 400 businesses were burned and looted and destroyed. | ||
| 127 police and firefighters were injured and hospitalized. | ||
| Um, the, the city police force was overwhelmed and the city was really having a, you know, no ability to respond. | ||
| It was, it was sort of out of control. | ||
| And as governor, I, uh, declared a state of emergency. | ||
| Send in 4000 members of the National Guard and 1000 police officers into the city. | ||
| We allowed peaceful protests to go on for a week, but we shut down the violence. | ||
| We stopped the burning the looting. | ||
| And all the damage that was being done. | ||
| And I write about this extent. | ||
| I think I have five chapters on this in the book. | ||
| I walked the streets of Baltimore for a solid week to listen to people. | ||
| I was hugging people who lost their businesses and their homes. | ||
| I was meeting with community leaders. | ||
| I was talking to faith-based leaders. | ||
| I was walking the streets where Freddie Gray's neighborhood. | ||
| I was dealing with the crisis, but also trying to lower the temperature. | ||
| I think we found the balance of, I call it Reagan's peace through strength. | ||
| We sent enough people in there to keep the citizens safe, to not allow the violence and destruction, without further inflaming You know, the anger and violence by moving too aggressively. | ||
| You know, we just, you know, if you were protesting in the streets, it was okay. | ||
| If you're throwing rocks and setting things on fire, we're going to arrest you. | ||
| And I think the mistakes that were made in some of the large cities today by just letting, you know, mob rule take over and just not to respond at all is a big mistake. | ||
| There are obviously legitimate frustrations in the black community. | ||
| And I was very proud of, actually, Baltimore this time, as we're seeing things erupt everywhere. | ||
| It was mostly very peaceful protests without the violence and destruction this time. | ||
| And I think our police, state police, National Guard, and city police in Baltimore did a really good job. | ||
| And I think the citizens here did a good job. | ||
| They were actually pointing out the handful of You know, violent folks that weren't even from the city and saying, hey, stop this. | ||
| They wanted to just peacefully express their frustrations. | ||
| But it's something we've got to get a handle on. | ||
| And I, you know, I understand both sides of the argument, but I talk about this extensively in the book. | ||
| I think you've got to, you know, we've got to find a way to get this under control while addressing some of the concerns. | ||
| How miserable of a decision is it for you when something's going down in one of your cities, in this case, Baltimore, where you have to then bring in the National Guard or something else where I know it's your preference to let the mayor hopefully do his or her job and make sure that they take care of business. | ||
| But as we're seeing in a lot of these states right now, I mean, we're really seeing it in Portland right now, the mayor seems either unwilling or unable to do anything. | ||
| And now we've got, in effect, we've got federal troops. | ||
| Yeah, they're making the mayor, I think, by not taking action early. | ||
| I think they made a mistake. | ||
| I was very prepared for that. | ||
| I kind of saw what might be happening. | ||
| Our team, we stood up the Maryland Emergency Management Agency about a week in advance. | ||
| We saw things potentially bubble up a couple days earlier. | ||
| I was ready with an executive order already prepared. | ||
| I've been in constant contact with the city. | ||
| It's the first violence that broke out. | ||
| I was on the phone with the mayor saying, you know, this doesn't look like you have it under control. | ||
| I took action within a matter of hours to come in and back up the beleaguered police that were overwhelmed in the city. | ||
| And I think, you know, that early and aggressive action again, it's sort of like this pandemic. | ||
| There's no time to delay. | ||
| and hesitate and to be too passive. | ||
| But again, we didn't go in there and aggressively cause further escalation of the problem. | ||
| We just went in there to keep the citizens safe and they're very appreciative of it. | ||
| The people in Baltimore were like, thank you, because they were scared. | ||
| They were really worried about this violence and the people trying to take over their city. | ||
| Are you hearing from just regular people that they're really worried about the sort of mob rule that seems to be taking effect, regardless of whether you're for statues staying, the fact that they are just coming down all over the place, as opposed to let's, you know, let's vote and make a decision or have, you know, some process related to the law. | ||
| I mean, whether you want them down or not, I think most people agree that tearing them down Right. | ||
| Are regular people bringing that up to you, that the rule of law seems to be up in the air at the moment? | ||
| Well, to me, I'm shocked that this is even a debate, really. | ||
| I mean, we did have, although I was praising Baltimore this time about the lack of violence, we did have a situation where in Little Italy, a smaller group of folks tore down a Christopher Columbus statue. | ||
| Now, I'm not here to debate the merits of whether Christopher Columbus was a great guy or not, but there's no way That we should encourage, you know, mobs to be able to tear down whatever piece of art or history that they want to, instead of going before the city council and arguing why they think they maybe should, you know, put that in a museum or do something else. | ||
| We actually had a city councilman member in Baltimore, while they were tearing down that statue, that tweeted something like, you know, maybe they should consider going down and tearing down another statue that was built to honor fallen police officers. | ||
| A memorial that was put up by the families of... I mean, it was just unbelievable that we're having these kinds of discussions. | ||
| I understand the debate about some of these statues. | ||
| Maybe we really should take a look at, you know, making a decision to remove them. | ||
| And I think that's an argument and discussion we definitely should have. | ||
| And some of them, I understand why they may be offensive to some folks. | ||
| But you can't just allow mobs to decide which ones they want to tear down. | ||
| Yeah, well, we seem to be in this sort of mob moment, I suppose you could call it. | ||
| What are you seeing between the tension right now between the Republicans and the Democrats? | ||
| You strike me as what I would say is a pretty moderate Republican. | ||
| You can assess that statement however you'd like, but that's what you strike me as. | ||
| What I'm worried about is that, I don't know how much you know about me, but I was a lifelong Democrat, lefty, progressive. | ||
| Until the last couple of days. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And what I'm worried about. | ||
| Then you saw the light. | ||
| And here we are, right? | ||
| And here we are. | ||
| But what I am worried about is that my former side, so to speak, and I don't like doing it in sides, but there's only so many ways we can talk about these things, that my former side, that it seems like if you don't go fully woke, if you don't go fully to where the Bernie AOC energy is, that they're just gonna take you out. | ||
| And are you seeing that at a state level too? | ||
| Oh yeah, no, there's no question about that. | ||
| And so yeah, look, I'm a lifelong Republican. | ||
| I was a chairman of Youth for Reagan, and I would say most of my life I would be considered a conservative Republican. | ||
| And now I guess they call me a moderate because I really try to avoid the extremes of either party. | ||
| And I think one of the problems we have today is that, first of all, I like to avoid the divisive, angry rhetoric, and because I want to work together to get things done, that makes me a moderate, I guess. | ||
| I don't think, you know, trying to get things done and finding compromise, you know, is a dirty word. | ||
| Compromise isn't a bad thing. | ||
| Doing nothing is a bad thing. | ||
| Getting nothing done. | ||
| Standing up. | ||
| I'm going to stick to my principles, but I'm not going to accomplish anything. | ||
| But, you know, right now I think the Democratic Party is moving too far to the left. | ||
| And I think the Republican Party is now shrinking their base down to not appeal to enough people. | ||
| And there's a growing number of people that are either moderate or right of center, left of center, who are somewhat frustrated with the entire political process. | ||
| And they're like, this is the best we can do. | ||
| And they're not really on the extremes of either party. | ||
| You see polling that says maybe 15% Consider themselves very progressive or very conservative on each side. | ||
| And everybody else is somewhere in the middle. | ||
| And they're saying... So how do we fix that? | ||
| The exhausted majority that goes, why can't we get somebody normal? | ||
| And why can't we get something done? | ||
| So how do you fix it? | ||
| How do you fix it? | ||
| It's hard to fix it. | ||
| But I mean, part of it is, I mean, it's a broken look. | ||
| Some people have given up and they're like, we're never going to fix the broken politics. | ||
| You know, I would argue that some of that we've been and I talk about this in my book. | ||
| I think you can lower the temperature. | ||
| Try to avoid the divisive rhetoric. | ||
| Try to find ways to actually work in a pragmatic way. | ||
| But there's also structural things that we have to do. | ||
| I mean, we got to get rid of gerrymandering and the way our primary process works. | ||
| Only the people on the extremes win the primary. | ||
| There's no competitive races anywhere in the general elections, typically. | ||
| And we end up with, you know, people in Congress that are, you know, not ever going to agree on anything and not ever meet in the middle on anything. | ||
| I think we've got to kind of work on how do we elect people that are willing to go down and work together. | ||
| I think people are frustrated, whether they are on the right or the left, about the fact that nobody can get anything done. | ||
| I'm willing to work with anybody. | ||
| I'm kind of willing to get to work and get things done school of politics. | ||
| I don't care if you're a Democrat or Republican, if you'll help me fix the problem. | ||
| Yeah, and that's sort of been your position with Trump, right? | ||
| Because you've obviously, I mean, even here, you've been critical of some of his responses, but then there's some other things that you think he's done pretty well. | ||
| Yeah, no, well, look, I've never been one of those people. | ||
| You've never seen me as one of the guys that's on constantly criticizing the president for no reason. | ||
| Never done that. | ||
| Never been going after him in a personal way. | ||
| There's plenty of people on TV that'll do that constantly. | ||
| But I'm also never, I'm not one of those Republicans that's afraid to speak up If I disagree, which, you know, a lot of them are, I just pretty much like, I tell it like it is. | ||
| I mean, I have, you know, I respect when, I praise the president when they do something right. | ||
| And, and I, and I agree with him when I think, you know, he's, he's, he's in the right on something, but I always say, if they haven't done something well, I'm going to, I'm not going to just sit down and shut up and then keep it to myself. | ||
| And there are a lot of Republicans who agree with me, but they're afraid to say it. | ||
| Does it ever sort of kill you that like a nice guy like you, that Trump was willing to do all the things that maybe somebody like you wouldn't have done? | ||
| And when I say someone like you, I mean, someone like me too, that there are sort of more moderate people that maybe just won't do the things that it takes to win at that level. | ||
| It's not even a judgment. | ||
| It just sort of is that we're all sort of wired a little differently. | ||
| We all take the temperature of the room a little bit differently. | ||
| You know, look, I'm willing to stand up and fight for the things that I believe in, but I'm not for divisiveness and dysfunction. | ||
| And I would argue that people like me, and we've looked at our record over the past six years, we've been more effective and can get more things done. | ||
| I'm not sure and it's not talking about philosophy now or we're not agreeing with many of the president's positions of philosophy I would agree with on the economy and I think he's done some things that are pretty good but he hasn't got a lot done in Congress and some of it is that personality and some of it is I think he could be more successful. | ||
| I think sometimes he's his own worst enemy and he could be more effective if he tried to do some things a little differently. | ||
| So yeah, I get it. | ||
| You got a stand-up invite, but sometimes that's not the skill set that you need to use to get things done. | ||
| Let's talk about the personal side of the book a little bit. | ||
| You talk about battling cancer, so let's talk about it. | ||
| Yeah, so I talked about the riots, you know, that was right after I became governor, and I went through that. | ||
| I'd been through my first legislative session, which is a 90-day session here in Annapolis, and I was on my first trade mission to Asia. | ||
| I went to Korea, China, and Japan. | ||
| I noticed a lump in my throat, and I was feeling some aches and pains, and I decided that, you know, go to a doctor to check it out. | ||
| I just wasn't feeling terrible. | ||
| I just felt a little rundown and a few things that I noticed. | ||
| And I had three doctors come in and tell me that I had very advanced and aggressive cancer. | ||
| From my neck to my groin, I had 50-some tumors. | ||
| And it was a rapidly growing, life-threatening, large B-cell, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. | ||
| And it was pretty grim news. | ||
| They told me I'd been governor for five months. | ||
| It was Friday of Father's Day weekend when I got this news and I, you know, I had to go home and, you know, it hit me out of the blue. | ||
| I had no idea, you know, that this was going on. | ||
| I don't know how these things were growing inside of me and I didn't know. | ||
| I'd been through all that work, winning the campaign, going through all that, you know, really working hard, you know, 10, 12 hour days, seven days a week and still working like the Energizer bunny. | ||
| But I, The hardest part was, how am I going to explain this to my family? | ||
| I went home and told my wife and my three daughters, who were there for Father's Day weekend, and I had to explain it to my 80-year-old dad, who was over for Father's Day. | ||
| And then I went and had to explain it to my staff, who had worked so hard. | ||
| Just, you know, helping us put the administration together. | ||
| And then I had to tell the six million people in Maryland who just put their faith in me. | ||
| And it was a difficult thing. | ||
| I was going through 24-hour day chemotherapy. | ||
| I went through about an 18-month battle. | ||
| I was very open and transparent. | ||
| I mean, I shared everything I was going through. | ||
| And it was, you know, it was an incredible You know, I really, I think I have a different perspective on life. | ||
| It made me realize the important things. | ||
| And I got to meet some incredible people who are going through much tougher battles than mine and got to meet their families. | ||
| And it's a whole nother focus for me. | ||
| And even if I'm not a governor, it gives me, I mean, I'm going to continue to fight to help, you know, raise awareness and raise money for these terrible diseases. | ||
| I mean, so many people are touched by cancer. | ||
| Everywhere I go, because of my experience, people know about it, and they'll share their story about what they went through, or their spouse, or their child, or one of their parents. | ||
| Somebody you love has been through this before, and it was pretty incredible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you think about not coming back even once you were on the other side, just because you didn't want to deal with the stress or anything like that? | ||
| You know, they asked me at my very first press conference when I announced this news, and I'll tell you a funny story. | ||
| I had to do a biopsy surgery. | ||
| They had to take a lymph node out from under my arm and the doctor said, you know, you're going to be fully under anesthesia. | ||
| We're going to give you some pretty serious painkillers. | ||
| So you just got to go home and rest. | ||
| And I said, well, I can't, I can't go home and rest. | ||
| I got to go to a press conference. | ||
| And he says, oh, you can't do a press conference. | ||
| You know, you're going to be out of it. | ||
| And I go, well, I have to, because I'm going to go in to start my 24-hour chemo. | ||
| And he goes, they're not going to ask you questions at this press conference, are they? | ||
| And I go, yeah, pretty sure they're going to ask me questions. | ||
| So I stood up there and took questions. | ||
| And they were like, you know, are you going to resign? | ||
| Is the lieutenant governor going to take over? | ||
| What happens if this? | ||
| And what happens if that? | ||
| And I was sort of on truth serum, because I had all these drugs in me. | ||
| And I just It was, you know, it sounded like I was telling my family in my living room. | ||
| I just told the whole public exactly what was going on. | ||
| But I, you know, I never thought about resigning. | ||
| I'm like everybody else that went through cancer. | ||
| I still had to try to, you know, try to do my job. | ||
| And I was working from the hospital bed. | ||
| You know, I was, they were feeding me full of so much drugs and, you know, I was doing steroids and I was up all night. | ||
| So I was actually working more from the hospital. | ||
| I was texting all night and telling people, you know, get this done and get that done. | ||
| Well, listen, I know we're tight on time here, so my final question, since you are in Annapolis, and I mentioned right before that I get to Annapolis pretty often, do you know the name of that Mexican joint on Main Street in Annapolis? | ||
| They've got some of the best margaritas and tacos I've ever had, and I've been trying to think of a name the entire time I'm talking to you. | ||
| I guarantee one of your staff knows. | ||
| Well, one of the staff, what's the best place on Main Street? | ||
| The Mexican joint, that little Mexican joint. | ||
| There's a whole bunch of them. | ||
| They do street tacos. | ||
| Oh, it's just great. | ||
| I don't know, but I'll tell you what, when you come into Annapolis, we're going to take you there. | ||
| We're going to find out and we're going to get you there. | ||
| You know, we're going to get some margaritas when I see you here in Annapolis. | ||
| That would be a pleasure. | ||
| Well, Governor Larry Hogan, thanks for doing this and good luck. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I enjoyed it. | ||
| All right, and if you guys know someone who could appreciate a different viewpoint, be sure to share this video by clicking the share arrow below. | ||
| Thanks again, Governor. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you wanna watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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