The following interview took place on Crooked’s Offline podcast with Jon Favreau.
A very rough transcript of some key excerpts:
WALEED:
I think that's kind of the best version of Adam Jentleson''s piece, and there are parts of that I don't disagree with. The part I disagree with most is that somehow the Sunrise Movement, Working Families Party, Justice Democrats, the ACLU, and the groups Adam named are the primary cause or the primary reason that Harris lost this election, and there are a lot of reasons why I don't buy that. It is a convenient excuse for people who are making an argument for their preferred ideology.
I will say that we have to look back at 2020—the left was so much louder in 2020 when Biden had historic margins and historic youth turnout, historic turnout, and like the calls, millions of people were in the streets calling for defunding the police. A polarizing, unpopular slogan. And Biden still won. Sunrise was much louder. Some of the other progressive groups were much louder. I'm not saying that Democrats should have run on defund the police this time around. I'm just saying there's a counterfactual on which these left-wing and progressive groups were much louder in a time where the margins were better for Biden. People were mobilizing to the polls because they thought it would deliver police reform on some level. It wasn't that Biden completely distanced himself from police reform—he actually came and said he wanted to deliver racial justice and do the Justice in Policing Act.
So that's one of the main issues I had with Adam's piece. The second issue is, like, we have 330 million people in this country. We have two parties. There's always going to be conflict between people who have various passions, interests, or grievances about their particular cause. It's the role of movements to pressure parties and get wins and concessions and be seen and recognized, and it's the role of parties to figure out how to navigate those tensions and conflicts.
I have advice for movements and I have advice for parties. The role of movements is to make their demands popular, majoritarian, and win over the public, and it's the role of politicians to follow that movement if it happens. When it comes to stuff like transgender rights, many people in my family voted for Trump for the first time this election. I obviously come from a Muslim American family. It's a unique demographic in this race, but like, a lot of people in my family who voted for Trump did not attend college, so they fit in this kind of working-class conversation.
The number one reason they voted for Trump was because they thought he would be different on Gaza than Kamala, and because he said he would, and Kamala didn't say she would be different than Biden. And like, the transgender stuff did come up, but it didn’t come up from groups. It came up from a three-year-long Christopher Rufo, far-right misinformation campaign, conspiratorial campaign, dominating YouTube, TikTok, and WhatsApp about kids basically going to school and their teachers convincing them to change their gender and promoting that in schools. Then they come home confused, and their parents are upset.
I don't think that's because of the groups. I don't think Adam's perspective on it—that it was the fault of the ACLU questionnaire in 2019—is going to help us in the next four years. This is a place where we need to do more; politicians need to make more space and encourage social movement organizations and LGBT rights organizations to do some persuasion on transgender rights because I empathize with family members who just found out.
I know it sounds silly to people like us who listen to Pod Save America, but people in my family just found out about they/them pronouns within the last four years, and the only people talking to them about it are far-right YouTube and far-right TikTok. The Democrats' approach this time around was kind of to either pivot away from the issue or say this is a distraction or give a non-answer. I'm not blaming Kamala Harris for that, but I think part of it is that we could have seen this coming two years ago. I'm not saying Biden or Harris needed to do anything on it, but there could have been, in the same way there was a huge campaign for same-sex marriage between 2004 and 2008, that had some allied politicians. I just didn’t see that same kind of infrastructure on one of our weak points as a party that could lean into the movement's strengths and create the room for politicians to be able to make it a majoritarian issue and change.
The number one issue for transgender people is not athletics. No trans friend of mine has that as their number one issue. It's public safety and healthcare. And, yeah, I think we dropped the ball there. Same thing on immigration. I just thought it was an overly ham-fisted take. I'm curious what you think about some of this because you said you've been on the receiving end and part of the pressuring group.
For anyone who knows me outside of politics, anyone who knows me in real life, I am a critic of the left within the left. The groups Adam named are some of the most strategic groups on the left. When I started in politics, very few social justice organizations were doing electoral politics at all. They were doing disruption and protest and maybe a little bit of advocacy. After Bernie ran in 2016, a lot of those movements started engaging in politics, which is a good thing because when you engage in elections, you have to win a majority.
So, I’ve seen improvement, and I think we're at this place where there's this tension between movements and parties. They aren’t for the same things—they’ve never been for the same things. Abolitionists protested Lincoln. The labor movement protested Roosevelt. The civil rights movement protested LBJ. ACT UP protested Clinton. This is American history. It's a big country. People had a lot of demands, and wishing away all of civil society when Trump is about to crack down on those same activists is, yeah, an overly simplistic explanation, I think, and not helpful…
WALEED:
I also really liked Benjy Sarlin at Semafor, who wrote a piece about the 2020 primaries. You didn’t contradict this, but there was Bernie, then there was Biden, and then there was everybody else. Benji's point in his piece was that it wasn’t just the groups pressuring for some of these positions. It was that Julián needed a press hit and Beto needed a press hit. Kamala needed one too—they needed some differentiation to get some headlines going because there were 20 people running. When Beto said, “Hell yeah, we’re gonna take your guns,” or when Julián said, “Will you join me in supporting decriminalizing border crossings?” I don’t know if that was an interest group thing, as much as I need to show the kind of grassroots I need the media's attention and get applause from grassroots activists. That was probably a misguided approach, but it made sense in a 20-person crowded field where everyone was trying to figure out how to differentiate themselves.
The second piece is on the focus of the party. I’ve been thinking about this piece a lot. In 2019, I was home for Thanksgiving and got called in to do an MSNBC hit with Chris Hayes about Medicare for All. It was a debate between the Bernie wing and the Biden wing on Medicare for All. I went because I guess I hate spending time with my family during Thanksgiving, so I decided to do the studio hit. My parents don’t read the New York Times; they don’t read English at a college-educated level, but they do watch CNN and MSNBC. And it was like the debate we all know happened for a year about Medicare for All: How do you pay for it? What are you going to do about your mansion? Are you going to eliminate private healthcare? A 10-minute debate between me and a Biden person.
I come back home, and I’m like, “What did you think, Mom and Dad?” in my head. They said, “Honestly, we didn’t really understand what you guys were talking about.” And it was because the debate was so focused on inside baseball tactics—it wasn’t like... I think both me and the Biden person and Chris lost the real focus for the non-college-educated, "low-information" voter who decides general elections.
So, on some level, my reflection about the 2020 primaries is: Who did that actually make sense to? Some of those debates were kind of arcane and difficult to understand. We do have a professional class in the party that isn’t just activists, but the journalist class, the DC pundit class, the average MSNBC viewer who's super hyper-engaged. I don’t think they’re even left or woke, but they care about these minute things that don’t forge a collective will of what the party is about, who the party is for, in the simplest and broadest terms.
Trump is a lot easier to understand, just on a reading and comprehension level. He dumbs things down—it’s classic authoritarianism, strongman stuff. It’s like, the system is broken, I’m going to fix it, and the people to blame are these others you don’t know. So I’m doing some introspection. I’m thinking about that moment a lot, where I’m like, how much time did I spend in 2019 and 2022 having a debate about single-payer healthcare and how you’re going to pay for it? What about Joe Manchin? Honestly, my parents, who have voted Democrat their whole voting career, watched 10 minutes of their son and didn’t understand what the substance of the debate was or how it affected them. And it’s about the information environment.
Waleed: The thing I'm left wondering about is, I mean, you did a whole podcast called The Wilderness after Hillary lost in 2016.
JF: Looks like we're gonna need another season of that.
Waleed: No, I know, but I'm having so much déjà vu that it annoys the shit out of me because I'm like, what? We had all these conversations in 2016, 2017, 2018, and like, what did we learn that was right? What didn’t stick? Because back then, the Bernie left critique of Hillary Clinton—one reason she lost was that, kind of, Adam's argument—like managing a coalition, representing a lot of interest groups, not having a simple message, a populist message, and like, overly, like, part of that was because the Hillary campaign spent a lot of time in the primary saying that Sanders wasn’t paying attention to issues of identity and race and gender and sexuality, and so it kind of affected her general election campaign. Now it's like, turn the other way around, where the left is overly focused on those things, and I'm like, I don’t know, like, I’m kind of like, uh, what happened? Some of these lessons apply to both sides, and like, how do we get, how are we in the wilderness again?
JF: Well, I do think that’s a great example, and I was just talking about it with someone the other day because I think Bernie’s campaign in 2020 was different than Bernie’s campaign in 2016. In 2020, he did... In 2016, he was like, you know, one-track mind, talking about economic populism, the establishment, the status quo—like that. He just had his message down. In 2020, he was doing a little bit more of that. I think his campaign reflected a little bit more of that coalition management, that sort of Hillary Clinton did a lot of in 2016. I mean, it’s interesting, she, in that primary in 2016, my view is like, this is the source of it—the primary in 2016, not necessarily the primary in 2020—because in order to get to his left, she couldn’t go there on economic issues because it’s Bernie.
So, she decided to go to his left on social and cultural issues, and when he would say something like, “The establishment,” she’d be like, “Oh, you’re calling Planned Parenthood the establishment? Therefore, you must be, uh, not sufficiently pro-choice.” Or you’re calling common-sense gun reform groups, you know, the establishment, so you’re not good on gun safety. So I think we were sort of left with that version of the Democratic Party post-2016—that sort of Hillary’s campaign... and a lot of it was a reaction to Donald Trump as well, right? Like we should say, I think Donald Trump winning, I think, let a lot of people think, well, if that guy can win saying all the shit that he said that we know is not popular, or we at least don’t think it’s that popular, then maybe we can win. Say whatever, and really say what we believe and push for the most ambitious agenda possible.
And, you know, we can run someone like that and have them win too, if Donald Trump can win. I just don’t, you know, eight years later, I don’t think that’s where the electorate is. And I’m just trying to figure out how we get the electorate to that place. And clearly, there’s a role for activists and movements to persuade people and to change public opinion on this. And there’s a role for politicians to both like sometimes agree with that and sometimes disagree and try to win their own races. But there is something with the communication between politicians, people in politics, and the movements and just everyday activists on social media that is not working well. Part of it’s because of the nature of social media. I think part of it’s because, again, the right jumps in there and they cause trouble as well. Journalists like to stir up trouble on this because it makes for a good story when, you know, certain voices are fighting. But I don’t know how we get to a place where we can sort of strategize in a cohesive way, knowing that we’re going to disagree, right?
Activists are going to disagree with politicians. It’s been like the case throughout history. We know that disagreement’s there, but it feels like we need a better way to sort of communicate and give each other the space where we can disagree with each other, but not, like, accuse people of just bad faith or throwing people under the bus or exaggerating what someone’s claim might be, which seems to be what’s happening now again. And that’s just, I don’t know, that’s something I’ve been thinking of, but I don’t know how you’ve been thinking about it.
Waleed: I’m like an example of this. I am the first in my family to attend college. I’m the first in my family to do anything in formalized politics. And a lot of, I spent particularly Black and brown organizers in progressive civil society... and I don’t know what it’s like at Pod Save or Crooked, but like, are often the first in their families to either attend college or be in a political space. And they carry the, part of being woke—the actual definition of being woke—is being like, oh, I know so much about how this country, I know the history of this country, the history of oppression, and like, now I have a chance to do something about it. And I have the burden of like, 11 million undocumented immigrants who still don’t have any relief, the burden of the world’s largest prison population, the burden of a rigged economy, and like, the white millennials who are in these spaces are often downwardly mobile from their parents.
And so, you have a lot of angry young people who have seen democracy not work for them. And like, you know, it goes back to the whole reason why Bernie was popular with young people: people want to change, want to change fast, and we’re fed up with the status quo. And then Bernie kind of brought a lot of this generation, including me, into formalized politics. And you have a—I feel a certain way that that class of people, particularly millennials and zoomers who’ve been handed a pretty shit world, are the ones who are now being blamed for a loss that I don’t actually think they had a lot to do with. Obviously, there are things that progressives need to do better. There are bad progressives and good progressives. There are bad moderates and good moderates. There are things we can all work on. But like, zeroing in on this class of young people is hard for me to swallow on what happened in the election.
I do think there’s a general phenomenon of like, how do we get, and I care about this deeply as a progressive person, like how do we get progressive movements and young people more interested in strategy, interested in coalition, interested in majoritarian politics, interested in learning about movement history and movement debates? The things happening today amongst all the questions you’re asking are the same questions that were asked to every movement in American history. And so that’s one piece.
Another piece is like, we haven’t talked about some of the things that are happening outside of movement groups. And to me, I have a Republican operative colleague. So I brought up some of this debate to him and asked him, why do you think we lost? And he, I don’t usually, I don’t think this has anything to do with it. Like, Biden was unpopular. She couldn’t differentiate herself from Biden. And that basically explains the story. And to rest the elect... to go back to themes of democracy, fascism, and then a comedian at Madison Square Garden, was not a recipe for success and did not project an image of strength with the kind of voters that you needed to bring over. And I don’t know if I agree with all of that, but even like the Lincoln Project Republican operative didn’t buy this, didn’t think this was the right debate to be having.
I’ve seen so much news coverage in the past week about a much harder conversation to have. You know, David Plouffe, I think he’s a smart guy, but having two people, two senior people closest to the candidate come from Uber—why aren’t we talking about that? I’ve never met an Uber driver who was happy with Uber. Uber drivers show me all this past year. Uber drivers, I’m not trying to pick on David or Tony West, but there’s a whole class of people who run the party who are not, who actually are in the room, who come from the most wealthy corporations and corporate clients in this country who are getting very little scrutiny in this debate and had a role in moving Kamala Harris away from an economic populist message and toward Mark Cuban, Liz Cheney, and a message that didn’t, and wasn’t what we started with, which was aggressive, risky, and calling them weird. It seemed like they went back to some of the 2012 stuff, which is like, play it safe, let him fail, let him do the Madison Square Garden stuff.
I don’t know, when you have people in the room who are extremely wealthy or work for some of the wealthiest corporations. Like, we have a consultant class that also deserves scrutiny, but we’re not talking about Sunrise Movement. Why? I feel like Allen Iverson—why are we talking about practice? What are we doing?
JF: I read Adam’s piece a couple of times for this, like, he definitely obviously calls out those groups. I don’t think he blames them for the loss. I certainly don’t. I haven’t heard a lot of other people blame those groups, and I would never blame all these kids, right? Like you said, right?
Waleed: But Adam and Matt Yglesias are saying no foundation should ever fund these groups from now on.
JF: And I’ve never really bought into the, like, it’s the foundations funding the groups. I think the desire for politicians to take these positions and to run on these positions is so much more complicated than like, a donor funds a group and the group does this. But what I always try to think about is, like, how to validate the anger that a lot of these young kids feel and sort of the ambition to build a better world because they’ve been handed a lot of shit, right? How to validate that while also guiding them towards a strategy that actually will help them accumulate power? Which is the only way we can actually...
On the consultant stuff, I have a nuanced view of this just because I’ve been in these rooms. Like, I don’t really know Tony, but he’s Kamala’s brother-in-law, so it makes sense that she would listen to him. Plouffe, like, look, if Tony and Plouffe were like, you know, if there was a ride-sharing policy that was way too lenient on ride-sharing companies, I’d be like, yeah, that’s kind of fucked up. But, like, Da... David is so, like, maniacally focused on the data and what’s gonna help win, and would take the most populist position ever if he thought it would help us win.
And I do think, look, she ended up talking about, you know, price gouging. She ended up talking about, uh, she did a lot of good stuff on housing, right? Like three million new homes, the $25,000 credit. She ended up having a pretty good economic agenda that was populist. I think it was a huge mistake politically and policy-wise for her to differentiate herself from Biden with a lower long-term capital gains tax rate. I don’t understand why that happened. I don’t think that...
Waleed: Republicans in the cabinet.
JF: Yeah, I don’t think that’s why... Republicans in the cabinet is also an easy one. You know, we put Ray LaHood in our cabinet as transportation.
Waleed: No, no, I know, but it’s not that. It doesn’t capture a lot of people’s attention.
JF: Yeah, well, this, but I'm saying it's, you know, as you said, it's like a country of 330 million people, and we are in the unfortunate position of having to have a much bigger, more heterogeneous coalition, or at least we thought we did. Now, the Republicans are trying to get a more heterogeneous coalition. But like, so yeah, I definitely have gripes about, could she have been more relentlessly on message in terms of economic populism? Yes, I think so. But that's also my own priors, and I’ve wondered, like, look, she, you know, she won in the exit polls on like, who cares more about people like you?
People trusted, you know, Trump more to manage the economy than that. I also agree, by the way, with your initial take that you could almost explain this entire election just because of inflation and backlash to Joe Biden’s unpopularity and part of the anti-incumbent global backlash, that was in part caused by the hangover from the pandemic, which is, you know, high prices, and the high prices sort of fit on top of an affordability crisis that has been brewing for years long before the pandemic, right?
And so when you add all that together, you have working-class people who are... I think where the social and cultural issues play in there is not that the majority is necessarily conservative on these issues, but that they see Democrats as focused on those issues more than they are focused on the economic aspirations of most working people.
Waleed: I'll say, yeah, two things. One, my point isn’t about like Uber's nefarious kind of influence on the campaign in a direct quid pro quo way. I just mean, like, demographically, there’s a conversation we have with professional, college-educated staffers all over the DNC and all over the Harris campaign who are calling the shots, and everyone’s afraid of them, and that’s why they’re making the decisions they do. In actuality, I don’t think that’s true at the highest levels of the party. You know, like, what would it look like to have more labor union leaders in the center of the room or senior advisors, or like that kind of stuff, instead of people who’ve worked in corporate America? That’s my point.
JF: That’s fair.
Waleed: And like, maybe that’s something we should also scrutinize if we’re going to scrutinize the groups. My second point is on what you're saying, like, you know, I don’t know how much there is that Kamala could have done in the position she was put in. Obviously, there should have been a primary to settle out. You know, Astead has talked a lot about this at the New York Times, like a primary would have helped the party update some of its positions, had some conflict, debated some of this out, see who’s reaching the mood of the country. I agree with that.
I still don’t know if we would have won, but the point you're making about, sorry, median voters thinking that the Democratic Party is overly concerned with social and cultural issues and not their issues or economic issues. I brought this up in my piece, but, one, we need to understand that, like, I mean, we both know this, and like, this is not the America my parents moved to, and it’s not the America your parents were born into.
Like, family, gender, sexuality, race, immigration, culture—this country has changed on fundamental levels. Again, like, most Americans learned about a pronoun that they never knew existed probably within the last five years. Within their lifetimes, same-sex couples can get married. You know, it was only in the past couple of decades that the majority of the American people were for interracial marriage. A majority of women now have to earn an income outside the house. Like, this all has happened within the last 50 years.
I used to think Bernie-style populism, or even the race-class narrative, which you’ve talked about in your program, was the best way to address this kind of stuff, which is like, this culture war is a distraction, they’re trying to divide and conquer us by using cultural issues to pit us against each other. I’ve become skeptical of that view because of this election, because I don’t think Americans are stupid. I think Americans realize the country has changed, and we’re telling them, “Don’t worry about that.” And like, I don’t have an answer or a forward-looking solution yet, but there’s one party that’s saying, “Yeah, the country has changed, and it’s bad,” and there’s another party saying, “Either get over it, or don’t worry about it, there’s nothing to see here.” And I think it’s kind of condescending in both ways.
JF: Yeah, because the other message is, if you're worried about it or you have questions, then you are just as bad as the Republicans who are using these issues as a wedge to divide us. Or you’re stupid, or you’re the victim of propaganda. I mean, like, I don’t know if you read that New York Magazine piece where the reporter went to AOC’s district to talk to a lot of the voters who voted for AOC and voted for Trump. It was like a working-class district in the Bronx, and he talked to a lot of minority communities. He talked to black voters, Latinos, Muslim voters, and Asian American voters. They’re all working class. When they talked about immigration, a lot of them are immigrants.
Waleed: One thing about what you just said, which is that on some of this stuff, like, I live in New York, and I notice that there are a lot of migrants selling fruit on the subway. It is visible and felt. At the same time, I'm like, people haven’t seen Gangs of New York. Everything you just described has happened in New York City a hundred years ago; they were just Irish. The fact is, in our country’s DNA and the story we tell ourselves, what’s happening today is not that different from what has happened historically. And I don’t know. I’m like, I... The Democrats, so far, are offering three proposals to this question of immigration or culture war issues, which are: one, the Republicans have a point, and I’m going to—some of the ads we saw in swing states—I'm also going to fix the border. I’m also not going to give benefits to “illegal” immigrants, blah, blah, blah. The second option is pivot to class war. And the third option is kind of a version of that, which is like, oh, we believe in racial justice and immigrant justice, and we should stand with the marginalized. I’m not satisfied with any of those three right now as proposals on how to deal with culture war issues.
And going back to something you said earlier, one of the only countries where the incumbent party was able to win re-election in the post-COVID era was Mexico. I’m not an expert in Mexican politics, but the center-left populist party, AMLO—he’s the president—would hold these three-hour daily press conferences where he would put up villains of the week who were populist villains responsible for Mexico’s inequality, corruption, and crime. AMLO had the third biggest YouTube channel in all of Mexico because these were entertaining, provocative, polarizing publicity stunts, and his party won a huge majority primarily from working-class people in the recent election that Mexico just had.
There are many people within the Democratic Party coalition, particularly at the higher levels of the party, who would think that kind of stuff is tasteless, uncouth, and gimmicky. And in terms of the war for attention and the attention economy, one thing I—like, President Biden held the least amount of press conferences of any president in modern history. Meanwhile, the president of Mexico is doing three-hour press conferences every day about the villains of the week. And so, I’m just like, we have to get a lot more creative. We have to make things a lot more punchy. Because the stuff on the far right, and stuff from Trump, is totally geared by these social media algorithms to grab your attention, and our stuff is kind of created by college-educated, middle-to-upper-middle-class people and geared toward, like, to be honest, the MSNBC audience, Pod Save's audience, my audience, which is not the audience that determines general elections and presidential elections.
I think we can all be honest about that. The audiences that I speak to when I go on TV or on Twitter or your audience are primarily people who are plugged in. And yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about how hard it is to make something break through, especially on economic issues. And we really, I think, I have not seen anything from the Democratic Party that gets close to what AMLO was doing in Mexico at all. Maybe some of what Bernie’s campaign did in 2016 or 2020, but this guy was the president and he was doing this stuff. So, I don’t know.
JF: No, I mean, look, I think I don’t even know if people think it’s tasteless. Some would.
Waleed: Joe Scarborough would think it was tasteless.
JF: I think that there are Americans who actually just see rich people like that and they get pissed off about people taking advantage of them, but they don’t necessarily see them as villains. But I do think that, look, your point is—having a president and leaders of the party who go up there and tell stories of how people in power are ripping people off and screwing people, I think is very, very important. It’d be very powerful, right? Like, I remember, I talked to some people in the Harris campaign, and whenever she talked about, she had this record as attorney general where she went after the big banks and got the best homeowner settlement of any other attorney general and kept pushing the Obama administration on that, even though she was friends with Barack Obama and was a Democrat, but she wanted a bigger settlement and went after for-profit colleges. And I was like, she talked about that all the time. We didn’t hear about that as much, and I do think that... Or like congressional hearings—Katie Porter has taken on a... or AOC or someone like that has taken on a drug company executive. That kind of stuff resonates with people a lot.
Waleed: It resonates, because there’s some conflict there.
JF: The one part of the race-class narrative that I think is smart is that we don’t talk about our values in a positive framework as much. Or when we do, it’s like cliché, poll-tested garbage, right? But, like, I don’t know that anyone really understands what our position on immigration is, right? It’s like, because when, like you said, a lot of the folks who talked about it in this cycle will say, well, I’m going to be tough on the border too. And I think people probably want an orderly immigration system, but if they just hear you say, I’m going to be tough on the border too, yeah, they probably think you’re doing it because it’s the election and you’re trying to run to the right of Republicans. Voters aren’t stupid. But I do think if you articulate a position that like, yeah, this is a country of immigrants, and we want people to come here who want to work and fulfill their dreams and raise their families and follow our laws, and if you’re one of those people, then we want to give you the chance. We don’t want to give anyone special treatment. We don’t want to make a mockery of our legal immigration system by letting people in who, you know, after there are people who’ve been waiting in line for years—citizens in this country. And so we want it to be fair, we want it to be equitable. We don’t want to give anyone special treatment, but this is a country of immigrants, and we want people here. Like, I do think articulating sort of a positive vision about each issue that speaks to where people are is at least one step that we just haven’t done recently.
Waleed: I brought this up in the piece, but the reason I'm a little prickly about some of what Adam writes in his piece is that Harry Reid famously said he opposed the Ground Zero, quote-unquote, Ground Zero mosque, which was a complete Fox News right-wing fabrication. I remember as a kid thinking, "What? This isn’t true. This feels so dehumanizing, so toxic." People are not trying to build a mosque at Ground Zero.
So, like, I want people to be specific about this. It’s better to have this conversation not online, but what are your proposals on immigration, transgender rights, and Palestine? Because I’ve witnessed the party take what I feel are immoral positions based on these conversations in the past. Ground Zero mosque is one of the ones that, for me, deeply impacted me and made me feel like, I don’t know. It’s like, we always have a Ground Zero mosque in every election. And so, how do you respond to that? This time, the Ground Zero mosque was around transgender rights, the border, asylum, and all this stuff. Yeah, I want people to get more specific. I’m not saying I have the answers, but I worry about what I’ve seen the party do in the past on some of this.
JF: Well, having worked for Obama when he was on the right side of that issue, and us knowing how unpopular it was going to be that he took that stance, even though Reid broke with him—part of the way out of that is that he and Ben Rhodes crafted a speech because Obama said, "If I’m going to take this position, we’re going to talk to people about it. We’re going to be honest, and we’re going to talk about the nuances in it." Again, it’s harder to do that in this information environment, but I do think we need leaders on our side who are willing to say, "I hear where you're coming from on that side, and I don’t agree, but it’s a valid view, and I’m going to be on this side of it." You know, like, I just think we can’t take shortcuts.
Waleed: Sometimes people respect the conviction and the time. Sometimes they don’t, but sometimes they do. And, like, I think we’ve all agreed that Harry Reid should have held daily three-hour press conferences.
Share this post