Transcripts For CSPAN Campaign 2020 Interview With Sen. Mich

CSPAN Campaign 2020 Interview With Sen. Michael Bennet D-CO July 13, 2024

Schools which was its own challenge and she was up for another challenge. My daughters had different reactions. We have three daughters. The girl who was then 14 said you absolutely should run. That was her reaction right out of the shoots. It made me glad she was so proud. The longer we talked the more i realized she saw it as an opportunity for me to be out of the house during her 15th year of life. She could be burning the place down for all i know right now. My 20yearold, her reaction was dad, if you run and tell the truth and you lose, no one can fault you for it. You say thatgood because there is no other reason for me to run and i dont think there is any other way for me to win. I was glad to send her the other day the editorial of the Des Moines Register which is the largest newspaper in iowa. They had a newspaper that said Michael Bennet pounds truth into this campaign which was at least a small token of what her charge was when i decided to run. Host there is also the thing from gary hard who said you have vision. What is your vision . First of all, democracy is vitally important to humanity. We have inherited a perfect inherited an imperfect democracy over 230 years. As americans over that time, we have worked to make this country more democratic, small d democratic more fair, more free. , it is our obligation to provide the same to the next generation. The next generation of americans doesnt believe that is what they are leaving to them. They believe we are leaving to them a mountain of debt. They believe we are leaving to them a lack of investment in our infrastructure. They believe we are leaving to them Climate Change unaddressed. They believe we are leaving to them a broken democracy because of citizens united. These are all things we have to fix. On top of that, america has an incredibly Important Role to play in the world. Woman, my moma who survived the holocaust, she , was a polish jew. Her grandparents left warsaw after the war. They went to stockholm for a year, then mexico city for a year, then came here the only , country in the world where they could rebuild their shattered lives. I know how important the idea of america is for people struggling to be free all over the world. Its not that we are perfect, far from it. But we are a beacon to the rest of the world. And i think i believe that reestablishing our place in the world is going to be one of the things the next president will have to do. Host lets talk strategy. Sen. Bennet jerry hard agrees with that stuff. Host how do you get back on the debate stage . How do you break through . Sen. Bennet this the debate , stage is just a discouraging place for the American People. I wont pretend that i wouldnt like to be on there. I wish that i were on there. But man, it is not doing a good job of elucidating the issues. Its not doing a good job of equipping, i think, our candidates, putting them in a position to beat donald trump. One thing i would say, i hope Going Forward we find a way to free ourselves from this. Ive often said that i think that roasts should be done away with, that its an art form that has outlived its usefulness. I sort of feel the same way about these debates. There has got to be a better way to get candidates to engage and to have a debate, a real conversation with the American People. Having said all that, a strategy is i have got to do better than expected in iowa and New Hampshire in order to stay in the race. I do think i have got a different perspective than other people about the nature of the corruption we face and how we have to overcome it. And i have really different experience from the other people in the race. I spent a bunch of time in business, a bunch of time running the demo Public Schools and 10 years in the senate. I think thats a useful set of experiences. Host we are in the middle of this impeachment debate. You will be a juror if it comes to the senate floor. But what has this done for the country, for democrats and republicans and for the American People . Sen. Bennet i think it is too early to tell. What i hope it will do is reestablish the importance of the rule of law and reestablish the idea that nobody is above the law including the president of the united states. Thats what i hope comes from this. You know, you and i will both remember watergate. That was a dark time in american history. I mean the vietnam war was the , backdrop for what was going on there. What Richard Nixon had done with watergate, but the democracy one won that episode in our history. I hope the democracy will win this episode. Host when you talk to your constituents, what are they telling you . Sen. Bennet mostly they are focused on their own economic situation. If i had to summarize the last 10 years of town halls in colorado and now in iowa and New Hampshire, it would be people coming and saying, michael we , are working really hard. We cannot afford a middleclass life. We cant save the next generation. And thats the vast majority of people in the state with one of the most dynamic economies in america. I am hearing the same thing in the early primary states as well. Host to delete your announcement because of prostate cancer. How are you feeling . Sen. Bennet im feeling great. Nobody needs to worry about me. Nobody wants to hear they have cancer and it was really scary. I was done with it in five weeks. What i would say to anybody watching is if you have a prostate, get it screened. If you dont, get Something Else screened. Because if i hadnt had it picked up just in a primary care screening, i would still be sitting here talking to you. And i would be really sick. And i wouldnt know it. It is another reminder, by the way, of why its morally reprehensible that we dont have universal health care. Host what does that mean for you personally . Did you make it more reflective . Sen. Bennet it actually meant a lot. It was interesting for me. Crazy you might say pathologically, it made me more committed to running for president. I discovered when i had the cancer that i was feeling really disappointed at the prospect of not being able to do it. I did not spend my life thinking i would run for president. It would have been useful if i had. But i didnt. And then i got cancer. I thought, now i will not be able to run. I was deeply disappointed. Then i discovered that i was going to get through it. Mostly, it made me feel again, it is insane that we have a Health Care System in this country where every single american doesnt have access to the kind of primary care that i had access to, the kind of screening that i had access to to detect my cancer. Not only is it morally reprehensible, but economically it makes no sense at all. All it means is that people dont have access to primary care are going to the emergency room to get things dealt with. Ive always believed that you have to try to make every day count. I believe that on the backside of the cancer diagnosis. Host we read your brother in the new york times. Whos the better writer . He, by far, hes the better writer. I think im a good writer. But not nearly as good as he is. And hes a gifted editor. Ive learned a tremendous amount from him over the years that i have tried to transmit to my three daughters about how to write short and compelling sentences. Host so what was your path to colorado . You were not born there. Sen. Bennet no. I got married to susan daggett. She is my wife, and she had a job offer in colorado right before we got married. Host how did you meet her . Sen. Bennet i met her we were in law school together. She didnt know that. I knew that because i knew who she was. I have seen her Walking Around i had seen her Walking Around the halls of high school. We met on a blind date at a concert. 1990 or so. 1994, i guess. She wanted to take a job with the sierra club. It is out of denver. I followed her there. That is how i got to colorado. Host for a while, you headed up and then and then for a while, you headed up the denver Public Schools. What was the biggest challenge . What did you learn . Sen. Bennet before i was in that shop, i was in the business of turning around distressed companies, companies that were wellrun companies but had terrible balance sheets, fixing that we fixed in bankruptcies. Held on for the longterm. Those experiences helped a lot when i got to the denver Public Schools. We had had declining enrollment for years and years and years. Every year, enrollment declined. We cut the academic offerings for kids. And kids and families responded by leaving the School District. It was a long, difficult process that involved a lot of people. But until recently, denver was the fastestgrowing urban School District in america. A month also or so ago, we got there was a study done by Stanford University that said the kids in denver are growing so much faster academically than than the kids in the rest of the state. Its as if they have 60 Additional School easier. Which on a 180day calendar, thats not nothing. We still have massive achievement gaps in my School District that haunts me every day. We are living in a country now where there basically has been no economic mobility for 90 of the American People for 50 years. Taken in its totality, our Education System is actually reinforcing the income inequality we have rather than liberating people from it, because the best predictor of the quality of your education is your parents income. And that has to change in america. You never hear about this on the debate stage ever. From the Vantage Point of the people that i work for, theres not a more important issue. And this lack of equity in our schools, the segregation in our schools, this is something that is tearing at the heart of our democracy and needs to be a focus in the next presidency. Host how do you fix it . When do you start . Is it prek, preschool . How do you clean up a lot of and wasted time for students getting to and from school, in between classes . How do you fix all of that . Sen. Bennet it is such a great point. It is not one thing. Its a million things. It really matters that we design the way we pay teachers in a labor market that discriminates against women. That said you have two choices, being a teacher or a nurse. Come see Julius Caesar and we will pay you a salary that no one else in your College Class would accept. But if you stick with us for 30 years, we will give you a pension you can retire on. Which sounded good because your spouse would probably die. That was all we offered when we developed the system. It is our offer today. When we design the system 300 years ago, it was important for kids to be available to work in the fields during the summertime. We still have a ninemonth calendar that reflects that Agrarian Society that we dont mostly live in anymore. So i think its not one thing. Its a million things. We have to take a system that is designed for a time two centuries ago and bring it into the 21st century. You mentioned preschool. Critical point. If you took a focus group of americans today and asked them, what does the Democratic Party standing for on education . What you would here is free college. That would be the answer. I am far more interested in free preschool for American Students then i am for college. Dropouts start in preschool. Thats when it starts. What about the 70 of kids that graduate from high school and dont go on to college . Today are forced to earn minimum wage jobs to take minimum wage jobs because we havent trained them and equipped them with the skills they need to earn a leaving wage a living wage when they graduate high school. We should reinvent high school so that every kid that graduates with a High School Degree can earn a living wage. That would transform the lives of millions of americans. When so specifically, should the School Year Began and end . Sen. Bennet that is not up to me. As president i would not design the school year for everybody in america. If i were designing one for my own kids, for the kids i used to work for in denver, i would say yeah it should be yearround. , more Shorter Breaks is better than having a long break in the middle of summer which people dont put too good use academically. My kids hate to hear me say this. Kids would be in school 6 days week, not five days a week. I will never get that accomplished. Its a reminder of how much more time you need to be focused on education. The other conclusion i have reached is that when one group of kids has access to preschool and another group does not, when one group has access to decent k12 schools and another group through no fault of their not and one group has access to Guidance Counselors and parents that went to college and the other doesnt, equal is not equal. And we have to invest more in poor kids education in this country than we are. And we have got to do more for parents. Instead of fighting a losing battle for medicare for all over the next 10 years, i would much rather win a battle to End Child Poverty in this country. I think that would make a huge difference for our country and a huge difference for the kids i used to work for in the denver Public Schools. Host theres an ongoing debate in republican circles whether we need the department of education put in place by president carter. What is the role of the federal government when it comes to education . Do we still need the department . Sen. Bennet its a great question. Its important because it administers our student loan program. I wish we used that program to incentivize universities to keep their cost low. College has gotten so expensive. And i think from a k12 perspective, what it could do, it doesnt do this under betsy devos obviously, but what it could do would be to help people on the ground learn best practices from other places and transmit them across the country. Basically what the department of education is is a passthrough of money from the federal government to local communities. I do think we have an important and vital federal role and National Role to make sure that the civil rights impulse of education is not lost. In other words, we need to be there to protect kids against inequities based on their skin color, based on the circumstances of their birth. We still have an Important Role to do, to play there. That represents the origins of the department of education. Host you have been an administrator, you are a senator. How does Michael Bennet make a decision . How do you structure the decisionmaking process in the white house . Sen. Bennet first of all, when people ask me, how have you done what youve done, i say, i find people that are better at doing their job than i would ever be. And i help put them against a challenge together that we face that is mutual. Thats what i would do as president. I think that we need to have somebody in this job that can attract the most talented people out of government and out of the private sector. Thats what always done. The nonprofit sector, that is what i did as superintendent. I didnt have a k 12 background. I found the best people across the country and in denver. Some of whom who were 8 levels down in the bureaucracy of denver schools to make the effort, to undertake the effort. I believe that having the most diverse Leadership Team that you possibly can have a significant and important because the worst decisions i make are the ones that i make by myself in my house. The best decisions that i make are those i make contending with people with different points of view, with different expertise. I would expect to see a group of very talented people and very diverse people, people that are willing to say no to a president. The way i would reach decisions is by weighing the evidence with those competing viewpoints and reaching a conclusion. Host and how would you define your ideology . Sen. Bennet i would say that i am a i believe in democracy. Thats how i define my ideology. I some people call me pragmatic, a pragmatic progressive, pragmatic idealist. I believe in democracy. I think our democracy is at risk. I will do absolutely everything i can to try to protect it. Host a Progressive Agenda that is providing a path forward on so many Different Levels and a more pragmatic approach that you and may Vice President biden and senator klobuchar and others are proposing. Sen. Bennet i realize that is how the newspapers define it and cable news define it. I dont actually accept that. I think about what are the policies that will be most useful for the kids and families i used to work for in the denver Public Schools . Fighting a losing battle about medicare for all i dont think thats progressive. That will not make any difference. Ending childhood poverty would make a massive difference. So i am frustrated as you can probably tell that those are the terms of the debate. Thats one of the reasons why am running. I trying to change that. Amhost who shaped your agenda . Ideology a teacher, your , parents . Sen. Bennet i guess i would say the kids in denver and their families. In the five years i worked with them in an effort to try to deliver a better quality education for them, i think thats really what has shaped my ideology. It is a feeling that this country has to be a land of opportunity for it to work. And for too many of our kids, they are cut off from that opportunity. I was

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